Re: Reenabling Ada by default

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

[Moved to GCC from gcc-patches.]

    ANY kind of batching is unacceptable.  Each individual patch needs to
    be submitted for review by its original author, reviewed in public,
    and checked in by itself.  This is the commit policy which every other
    contributor to GCC adheres to.  I do not see why the Ada front end
    should be a special case.

It has very different properties in terms of the way work is done on it
than any other part of GCC.  There are two major differences (and a
bunch of minor ones):

(1) The set of people who modify it is very localized.  There are extremely
few (perhaps no) people on this list outside of ACT/ACTE who are knowlegable
enough to make Ada front-end modifications (I'm talking here about the Ada
part and not including myself in that set despite being part of ACT).  There
would be nothing gained by making patches available for "review" on this
list, since there are few, if any, people on the list that could review them.
That's also somewhat true for front ends such as Java and Fortran, but the
number of people working on them is far smaller.

(2) Because Ada users are very conservative, they are not using recent
versions of GCC and the front-end developers must do their testing on the GCC
versions being used by the people who report the bugs.  Since committing the
patch to the FSF tree requires testing using the latest version of GCC, that
doubles the testing time.  For the other front-ends, developers mostly use the
head version of GCC.