GCC 6.1 release has been announced recently by Jakub Jelinek and it is now time to build a new Ada compiler with it. The process to do that is not complex but contains a few pitfalls.

After the recent announcement of the GCC 4.9 Ada compiler availability on FreeBSD by John Marino, I decided to do the upgrade and give it some try.

After a quick investigation, I´ve performed the following two simple steps on my FreeBSD host:

sudo pkg update
sudo pkg upgrade

Among several upgrade notifications, I've noted the following messages. The gcc-aux package corresponds to the GCC 4.9 compiler and the gnat-aux package contains the GCC 4.6.4 compiler.

Upgrading gcc-aux: 20130411_3 -> 20140416
Upgrading gnat-aux: 20130412_1 -> 20130412_2
Upgrading aws: 3.1.0.0 -> 3.1.0.0_2

The GCC 4.9 Ada compiler is located in /usr/local/gcc-aux/bin and the GCC 4.6.4 Ada compiler is located in /usr/local/bin.

Once the upgrade was finished, I've rebuilt all my FreeBSD jenkins projects and... it's done.

It worked so well that I wasn't sure whether the right compiler was used. Looking at the generated ALI file there was the V "GNAT Lib v4.9" tag that identifies the new compiler.

Next step is to perform a similar upgrade on NetBSD...