Re: Why not gnat Ada in gcc?

[kenner at vlsi1 dot ultra dot nyu dot edu (Richard Kenner)]

    With GCC the policy was the external tree was the master and Cygnus
    did merges from the external tree to its internal tree.  If folks made
    changes to the internal tree, they were responsible for either getting
    them into a state suitable for the external tree, or maintaining them
    for internal use.

    That strongly encouraged development to happen in a more open way on
    the external tree with input from external contributors.  It also
    leveled the playing field a lot for external contributors.

I agree with your comments, but the question remains for GNAT (at
least in the case of the compiler itself), whether there *are* any
"external contributors".  The sources of GNAT have been available
(albeit not in a CVS tree) for over six years and I can't think of
*one* external contribution to the compiler itself.  Perhaps Robert
may know of one. 

I don't see a point in investing effort up front to establish
procedures to deal with lots of external developers until we actually
see evidence that there *will be* any.

    I disagree.  For the playing field to be level for all GNU Ada
    developers, the tree on gcc.gnu.org has to be the master with no bulk
    merges -- or all GNU Ada developers have to have the ability to do
    bulk merges.

Yes, but again, this is only relevent if there *are* a set of "GNU Ada
developers".  I don't see any evidence of such a group at this point.
Sure, when the sources are in the GCC tree, it will encourage such,
but I don't expect that to make any difference whatsoever.

Are you aware of any GNU Ada developers "in the wings" out there?