Re: Why not gnat Ada in gcc?

[dewar at gnat dot com (Robert Dewar)]

<<Yes you can.  Cygnus did it for 10 years.

I can't believe you're using this as an argument that the official sources
for GNU Ada will be in the ACT repository, not gcc.gnu.org and that merges
should happen from the ACT tree into the gcc.gnu.org tree.  I'm dumbfounded.
>>

No one said anything of the kind. What we said is that we cannot possibly
deal with the kind of instability that we see daily in the open gcc tree
as the base for the version we provide to customers. And I must say I
am equally dumbfounded by the claim that Cygnus has always provided to
its customers the current open tree, that's certainly not my understanding!

Noone is saying that the internal ACT build is "the official FSF GNU Ada",
it is simply what we provide for our customers. Indeed one important
service we provide our customers is precisely a guarantee that they
get a very carefully quality assured version of the compiler, even if
they are getting a daily wavefront build.

Patches and major modifications to the open tree will come from whoever
develops such changes. For the immediate future, most such changes will
clearly come from ACT, if and when others contribute, changes will
come from them.

I am completely at a loss to understand what Jeff's concerns here are. He
seems to be fulminating away, objecting to the attempt to make the GNAT
development more open. Well I must say, I think it makes sense to proceed
along these lines anyway, and we certainly intend to do so.

Yes, certainly there may be cases where significant new developments
are done in increments that make sense (the sudden appearence of the
ia32 port was after all a spectacular case of that happening for gcc,
I would certainly hope that we would have *nothing* like that happeniung
in the GNAT case, it seems VERY unfortunate to me to get major out-of-the-
blue changes of this kind, and I think that should be avoided in future.