Re: 3.2 PATCH: Ada parallel bootstrap fixes

["Joseph S. Myers" <jsm28 at cam dot ac dot uk>]

On Tue, 14 May 2002, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:

> On Tue, 14 May 2002, Rainer Orth wrote:
> > * It restores the dependencies of gnat1 etc. on $(CONFIG_H) and prefix.o,
> >   otherwise insn-constants.h and insn-flags.h may not exist before they are
> >   used.  An equivalent patch by Richard Henderson has been lost in the last
> >   ACT merge and not been restored yet ;-(
> 
> How many *other* patches have been lost by these merges and still
> not restored yet by those doing these merges -- despite, for example,
> Joseph's repeated requests?

There's a PR (ada/6558) for the wrongly reverted patches.  The partial
list of the patches referenced there doesn't include the one mentioned
above; it's clear that the Ada maintainers need to go over *all* the
outside patches in the FSF repository, and make sure they haven't been
wrongly reverted, to fix that PR.  This will be high-priority for 3.2,
since some of the reverted patches are in 3.1 but reverted on the mainline
since 3.1 branched.

> I'm starting to get quite worried about the way Ada is maintained,
> where folks who are not Ada maintainers need to resolve (release)
> critical issues, merges are done such that changes in the GCC
> repository get lost, etc.

Ada has few enough users and bug reports - and bug reports of good enough
quality from those few users - and enough maintainers paid to work on it -
that it should be possible for lists of outstanding PRs and plans for
resolving them to be posted (as has been done for Fortran).  Although a
few issues have been fixed (e.g., the bug box - though the correct version
(with URL not email address) is only on the 3.1 branch, not the mainline,
which isn't something that should happen, and some of the issues I listed
with the manual), most PRs have received little apparent attention from
the Ada maintainers.  This includes security issues, as well as very basic
issues of integration with GCC build/install (such as not needing separate
make gnatlib_and_tools when bootstrapping from top level, and installing
info manuals by default).

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm28@cam.ac.uk