Re: Why not gnat Ada in gcc?

[Laurent Guerby <guerby at acm dot org>]

Disclaimer: I worked for ACT but I no longer do, I'm on the support client side now.

jeff wrote:
> I think that's the wrong model.  Dumping in massive changes like that makes
> it nearly impossible for others outside ACT to be involved with development.  
>
> I would much rather see the GCC CVS sources become the master sources and
> GNU Ada work happen in that source tree on an incremental basis just like
> the other parts of the GNU compiler suite.
>
> Basically the whole GNAT development process is closed to developers outside
> ACT.  That is terribly unfortunate.

IMHO, the problem we're trying to correct now is to get past the chicken-and-egg
bootstrap problem, no available GCC compatible source means no contribution
which means no incentive to provide public up to date sources...

If ACT provides sources compatible with the current GCC in CVS and the
GCC steering committee accepts it, that's a HUGE progress in the right
direction. So far, nothing has been decided (at least not publically
on this list) on the topic of the inclusion of the Ada sources in the
FSF GCC CVS repository.

The model proposed by Robert Dewar is the right one to start with, and
it will put the merging burden on ACT if some contributions are indeed
made by people having write access to the GNAT sources. If this
becomes significant, I assume the natural thing will happen (move of
the master source to the FSF CVS repository).

But I don't think we're here yet or anytime in less than a year, so I
don't think it is useful to argue on the source merging process right
now.

Up to now, GNAT source releases have been made something like every
year, so we have plenty of time ;-).

-- 
Laurent Guerby <guerby@acm.org>