Re: Beyond GCC 3.0: Summing Up

[dewar at gnat dot com]

<<If gcc has infrequent releases, this is an annoying problem: the gap between
3 years-separated releases is large, and highly noticeable... it might
cause problems, loss of revenues to vendors, and they might even cut
corners to try to alleviate those problems.
>>

Well it is clear that if the official releases are that far apart (everyone
agrees that 3 years is too long), then vendors will simply make their own
release schedules. Certainly say in the case of GNAT, we expect our release
schedule for our commercial GNAT Professional product to be basically
independent of the GCC release schedule, since the GNAT schedule is determined
by the needs of our Ada customers, which has nothing at all to do with the
GCC release schedule.

But I certainly agree it is reasonable to aim at a 6-month schedule for GCC
(I must say that it is awfully easy to miss such a goal, so it is quite
likely in practice that aiming for a 6-month schedule means achieving a
12-month schedule, which is about what we manage in practice with the
official releases of GNAT [though we do provide fully tested and qualified
intermediate releases almost on a day by day basis to customers needing
this kind of assistance].