Re: "GNU" and Ada

[Florian Weimer <fw at deneb dot enyo dot de>]

dewar@gnat.com writes:

> Note that right now, there is a library of (Free Software) Ada components
> that are part of GNAT called GNAT.xxx. This library is constantly being
> enhanced by ACT (and we hope in the future by contributions from others).
> It seems a bit confusing if such Ada components are split between GNU.xxx
> and Ada.xxx. 

(You mean GNAT.xxx, right?)

The GNAT.xxx hierarchy should reside in the GCC CVS, de facto with ACT
keeping control, and the GNU.xxx hierarchy would be maintained in a
more distributed manner.  This way, ACT can still add children to the
GNAT package without worrying much about conflicting names.

> I think the idea of the GNU.xxx hierarchy is certainly a good one.

Nice.  Perhaps we could agree to begin a GNU Ada Library, which could
form a roof for all the smaller Ada packages?

(I've started such a project internally, but haven't officially
released any code because of concerns with the "GNU" name, and it's
still not clear if we can assign copyright to the FSF, but I've been
told that copyright assignment is not mandatory for GNU packages, so
there is still hope.)

> Note that if people do prefer to have Ada stuff under this same hierarchy,
> then we could use package renamings so that the same functionality was
> found in both GNAT.xxx and GNU.xxx.

I'm not sure if package renaming is sufficiently powerful for that.
What happens with grandchildren of the GNAT package?

> (we can't really change GNAT.xxx to GNU.xxx in the GNAT context, since there
> is scads of code out there referencing the GNAT.xxx names).

Yes, this is of course out of question.