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"GNU" and Ada
- From: Florian Weimer <fw at deneb dot enyo dot de>
- To: gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org
- Cc: rms at gnu dot org, dewar at gnat dot com
- Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2001 09:19:50 +0100
- Subject: "GNU" and Ada
First some background information:
The Ada language offers a facility to structure programs into modules,
called "packages" in Ada terminology. (In some ways, packages
resemble C++ namespaces and a similar Java concept of which I don't
know the name.) Packages can be hierarchic, e.g. package A can have a
child package B, which can be denoted by "A.B".
Now my proposal:
Some people (mostly of the Ada for GNU/Linux Team) feel that there
should be a "GNU" package hierarchy which collects bindings to GNU
packages as well as independent Ada code (for example, a container
library, or a reasonably designed interface to operating system
features). Sample packages could be "GNU.MP" (a binding to the GNU MP
library, for dealing with numbers of arbitrary precision), "GNU.OS.IO"
(operating system I/O routines for the GNU system), and so on.
Someone is probably needed to maintain this shared namespace. If no
one else steps and nobdy objects, I am willing to do that. I can also
write a draft policy which describes the criteria according to which
names under "GNU" are assigned.
(I'm asking this now because someone has started to publish GNU.Xyz
packages which are not Free Software, for at least two reasons.)