Reenabling Ada by default

[Robert Dewar]

Zack Weinberg wrote:

> Richard Kenner writes:
> 
>>Zack Weinberg writes:
>>
>>>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. 
> 
> ...
> 
> 
>>(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.
> 
> 
> It does not matter how few people are qualified to review patches for
> the Ada front end.  The requirement is that patch review occur in
> public.  I am assuming that there is an internal review process; all
> we are asking is that you do that on an open mailing list so that
> others can observe.

The internal review process very often involves proprietary customer
information, so generally this kind of opening up is not possible.
Remember that the great majority of bugs that are being fixed by
AdaCore are from customers with proprietary code.
> 
> (I would support the establishment of an ada-patches@gcc.gnu.org
> mailing list so that people who don't care can tune out, as is done
> now for Java and libstdc++.)
> 
> 
>>(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.
> 
> 
> This turns out not to be the case.  I can speak here for
> CodeSourcery's customers only - many of them are still using 2.9x era
> GCC for C and C++.  And that does mean we have to test patches against
> the version they're using, then again against mainline, and yes, that
> does double testing time.  We do it, because that's what the community
> expects and requires of us.  The same is expected and required of the
> Ada developers.
> 
> zw