Reenabling Ada by default

[Kaveh R. Ghazi]

 > 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.

Grr, it's really frustrating that you use lack of expertise as an
argument for maintaining your behavior.  One of the powerful ways
people learn is by reading the patch list, *if* the patches follow our
rules.  A self-contained patch with an explanation (and testcase if
appropriate) is much easier to grok than a sterile jumbo batch.  You
merely help maintain Ada's marginal status by keeping everything
cloistered and the expertise all within ACT.

Also, "review" doesn't necessarily mean approve or reject.  Someone
completely ignorant of Ada might simply catch a spelling mistake in a
comment.  If you cooperate, eventually you'll find expertise and
participation increases to the point that code suggestions can be
made.  But this can't happen the way things are done now.

Nor does review mean it happens immediately.  Having the proper patch
submission helps for posterity in case anyone needs to go back and
examine it later.  The fact that ACT may have this information
internally fails to help the rest of the world.  Collaboration means
more than just sharing code in a common repo.


 > (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.

Lot's of contributors work for companies that have customers, none of
these customers use GCC head either.  When their customers report bugs
against older versions of GCC, the patches are submitted correctly
according to our rules and tested on every branch they are installed.
So your argument doesn't wash and I see no reason you should feel
entitled to behave differently than the rest of the community.

		--Kaveh
--
Kaveh R. Ghazi			ghazi@caip.rutgers.edu