Re: Why not gnat Ada in gcc?

[Laurent Guerby <guerby at acm dot org>]

Jeff wrote:
> From my experience it's a lot easier to deal with the merge policy
> at the same time you move the bits into the tree since it has major
> impacts on the development policy.

I for sure do not have your experience on this subject, but from what
I know about the Ada community right now, this is a non issue for at
least one year (major changes being made).

May be you have this opinion because you managed "high pressure" or
multi-contributors projects to go in public CVS for which I agree that
policy must be set strictly otherwise chaos will occur much to the
detriment of the GNU community.

> [...] Please keep in mind that those issues are ACT's problems and
> should not be a consideration for how to manage the GNU Ada
> repository. [...]  Any bulk merges need to be from the net sources
> to your internal sources.  Any other method would put ACT into a
> privileged position in regards to installing changes into GNU Ada.

In the long run and if other GNU Ada companies do emerge, yes I agree
that what you say is true. I assume such companies or individuals will
contact this list when appropriate, and that a fair policy will be set
up and inforced by the GCC steering committe in answer to such
requests.

In the short term I do think that arguing the merge policy is just
delaying the inclusion of the Ada front-end in the GCC CVS repository
(which is major work contributed/being contributed by ACT), and is of
no (or negative) benefit to the GNU (Ada & other) community.

Richard Kenner wrote: 
> I think the method of merges that will end up being the most
> appropriate will strongly depend on the extent of changes being made
> in the net sources.

Agreed. 

And if one big change from the net becomes a nightmare to merge for
ACT (problem of scope, not of quality of course) because of
significant changes made internally by ACT and not made available
publically, I assume the right thing will happen.  

It's even better actually if some collaboration takes place before
such change begin to be developped at first and I hope the scenario I
described won't happen (good candidate for README material anyway).

> As I say, a major difference between the Ada front end and that
> others is that it's *far* less likely there will any other people
> who will end up making changes.

I disagree, but it's not significant to the problem at hand.  Let's be
historians in a few years, and not speculators right now ;-).

-- 
Laurent Guerby <guerby@acm.org>