Re: ACATS legal status cleared by FSF

[Geert Bosch <bosch at gnat dot com>]

On Thursday, December 6, 2001, at 02:40 , Zack Weinberg wrote:

> I disagree in the strongest possible terms.  Put the B tests in the
> public repository.  If you don't, you only make life harder for people
> outside of ACT who wish to work on the Ada front end.
>
> The maintenance work has to be done anyway, and ought to be the
> responsibility of the person who makes the change that causes the
> tests to regress.  If the B tests are run as part of "make check" in
> the FSF tree, this will be enforced automatically.

I'd like you to first get more familiair with the test suite before
making such strong comments. Laurent and I both have a lot of experience
with this test suite and do not see much value in running the B tests,
whille the cost (in volunteer time) is high.

It is virtually impossible for people to "break" these tests, which
is why I say they are of no value. Even if people *do* manage to break
them (in the hypothetical case that the maintainers would not catch the
error before approving), this will not go unnoticed for a long
time anyway. In the mean time, the *only* programs affected  are 
programs
with fatal errors to start with.

I would be surprised if there would even be consensus to run just
the executable ACATS tests as part of make check, since this would
already double testing time for all contributors. Adding testing
requirements is not free, and there needs to be a benefit to it.

For most of the executable ACATS tests I think there is a good 
benefit/cost
ratio for the front end, and even for the back end. For that reason 
I am happy
to see Laurent doing the work to get them integrated. For the B 
tests, adding
testing is of near-zero value at a high cost.

Zack, I'd like to see very good reasons why you think it is 
reasonable to
significantly increase of required volunteer time to make GNAT changes
and that way hinder development and maintenance.

   -Geert