Re: Ada mainline

[Florian Weimer <fw at deneb dot enyo dot de>]

* Robert Dewar:

> I certainly did not mean to say that we won't review patches.
> We have received a few patches from customers, and we most
> certainly look at them, and we certainly intend to review
> any GNAT patches that people submit.

So far, there were only very brief periods of time during which FSF
mainline was in a good shape (based on ACATS and other tests) *and*
relatively close to AdaCore's internal tree.  Unless both conditions
are fulfilled, it's difficult to reach something that can actually be
submitted as a patch.

For example, my conservative GC patch[1] was overtaken by your
internal development (which was, at that time, mostly invisible as the
FSF tree wasn't updated).  What's worse, you made an implementation
detail of the run-time library public, which I had changed. 8-(

One day, I will try again, but this makes only sense if I don't have
to work from stale sources (either because the trees aren't in sync,
or the FSF tree doesn't even bootstrap).  And I've learned that bit of
coordination in advance is necessary, too.

> I would guess that it is relatively unlikely that people will submit
> patches for the front end, although it is certainly very easy to get
> into the GNAT front end if you know Ada

Indeed it's not too hard.  The inline documentation and GNAT's
cross-referencing tools are very helpful.


1. Based on the Boehm collector, with support for pragma Controlled
and Finalize_Storage_Only, and (mostly) correct classification of
pointer-free storage.  No, it didn't handle packed records correctly.
But tasking should have worked. -- All in all, it's almost in the
"obvious" category, but not completely. 8-)