Re: Freeze timing and questions

[<guerby at acm dot org>]

> You may recall that I was against the widening of the test for an
> existing Ada compiler for just this reason, but most people felt
> diferently.

And the argument at the time was let's see what existing Ada compilers
are known to work, since ACT people were strongly implying than the
ALT RPM compiler would cause trouble.

I'd say from day to day builds in the few past monthes that 3.13p from
ACT tarball and RPM from ALT on i386-linux are both working perfectly
fine - I've been working exclusively with the ALT one except for the
first days, I assume ACT is working with some 3.13 version
installed. We want to reject versions < 3.13 since GNAT has always
required version N-1 or above to build.

My preference would be to recognize them on i386-linux and enable Ada
if a known to work version is found. Same reasoning possible on
platforms, looks like on mingw32 we have someone taking care of GNAT
:). (Assuming by the time of the 3.1 release the Ada compiler is known
to be in good shape of course.)

But I have no strong feeling for 3.1 on this point, if people think it
turns out to be just safer to disable Ada by default, I have no
problem with that. 

I don't think it is necessary to commit a decision right now though,
having it still enabled for a while will give us a bit more
information on what's working and what's not, improving Ada configure
machinery, etc. If we don't have problem reports we probably won't
have an Ada compiler working well out of the box on lots of platforms.

As for GCC release criteria, Ada should not be one for 3.1, but 3.2
Ada should not have regressions against what was achieved for 3.1 :).

PS: my day job will hopefully stop drifting to a night job tomorrow
since I'll be on vacation for one week with three days of full
internet access and nothing scheduled (except watching LOTR :).

-- 
Laurent Guerby <guerby@acm.org>