Re: [Ada] Bootstrapping mainline GNAT fails

[dewar at gnat dot com (Robert Dewar)]

<2 years is not enough for a GCC versions to be considered anciant.
gcc 2.95 is still widely used, and it's older than that; you still
find a lot of people using egcs and even gcc 2.8, sometimes even 2.7,
out there.
>

One thing to note here is that we don't have that experience with GNAT.
It is quite unusual for people to be using anything prior to 3.13 at
this stage. Occasionally we get an odd report on a public version that
is earlier, and we just tell people to upgrade but that's a rare occurrence.

I think the Ada community is more oriented to wanting the latest version.
Who knows what the reasons are. Perhaps one thing is that the community of
Ada enthusiasts is a smaller, more tightly knit group, and for example
comp.lang.ada is quite effective and active as a forum for Ada enthusiasts
knowing what is going on.

It is big news in the Ada community when ACT provides a new set of
public releases, and nearly everyone learns about it very quickly.
Most volunteer/hobbyist Ada users/developers are much more concerned
with whey can they get their hands on the latest version of GNAT, than
worrying about whether they can successfully use their anicent version
of GNAT to do anything at all, let alone bootstrap the latest sources.

We have got that community excited about the prospect of having access to
the latest and greatest GNAT sources at the FSF, and I really think that the
most important thing to that community is to see the latest version of
everything, and that this concern about bootstrapping with ancient versions
of GNAT is of zero interest to that community.