GCC 4.7 has been available for quite some time. In fact, GCC 4.7.1 was released in mid-June. Originally GNAT AUX was intended to follow the latest trunk, and when that was discovered to be problematic, it was intended to follow the latest release of the latest major branch.

Now even that approach is problematic. For pkgsrc, DragonFly uses GNAT AUX as their way of building DragonFly world and kernel with a GCC 4.6 compiler. For FreeBSD, the GNATDROID cross compilers (and possibly other cross compilers in the future) are based on it. Furthermore, the GNAT AUX port/package are based on individual language tarballs which GCC discontinued after 4.6, so the entire makefile would have to be reworked again to use one monolithic tarball.

An additional problem is GNAT AUX installs at ${LOCALBASE} which means several libraries and binaries would conflict with other GCC-based ports installed there.

To address all these problems, a new compiler package, lang/gcc-aux, was created. It is based on GCC 4.7.1 and installs at ${LOCALBASE}/gcc-aux to avoid file conflicts. It is intended to migrate to GCC 4.8 in the future, so like GNAT AUX, it has a date as a version (currently 20120614).

The pkgsrc make file system was altered to recognize USE_LANGUAGES+= ada. This means that it is no longer required to specify a certain compiler for Ada-based packages. All the Ada packages, including Florist, were updated update to build with lang/gcc-aux instead of lang/gnat_aux.

At the same time, GPRBUILD was updated to version GPL 2012 and Florist was updated from version 3.15p to version GPL 2012. Future updates to xmlada, gtkada, and GPS are coming soon to pkgsrc.

These updates are not yet available for FreeBSD.