Ada mainline

[Diego Novillo]

On Thu, 2004-09-09 at 23:49, Robert Dewar wrote:
> Hmm I just read Diego's entire response, and it seems to
> amount to "the Ada patches should be handled the same
> way as the C++ patches",
>            ^^^
             GCC

>  but it doesn't say why.
> 
I didn't want to insult your intelligence by stating the blatantly
obvious.  Robert, you seem to be a seasoned developer and should know
this, but since you seem confused, I will state the obvious: If you want
to contribute to project FOO, then you make sure that you follow the
guidelines set by the community developing FOO.


>  I also
> didn't get an answer to my question of whether
> Diego was speaking as a an Ada expert or Ada user (I
> assume not), which I think is definitely relevant.
> 
Neither.  I am just a GCC developer.  What's the relevance?  I will
probably never review an Ada patch more than superficially.  I'll
probably see them fly by on ada-patches or gcc-patches much like I see
most FE patches go by.

I just want to help you understand how GCC development works.  The
contribution model is orthogonal to the complexity of the particular
module that you are interested in contributing.

The importance of this to you, as an Ada user and developer, is that if
you don't follow these rules (and are unsuccessful in having them
changed) your module will probably be largely ignored by the rest of the
community.  So middle-end/back-end changes that happen to adversely
affect Ada will be met with a shrug and/or half-hearted attempts at
helping you out.

> I really think that the Ada front end is quite different
> from the C++ front end.
>
Irrelevant.  The Fortran front end is quite different from the Java
front end, which is quite different from the Objective-C front end.

> In the case of the Ada front end we have a very
> small number of people contributing all the patches
> (this number is about 6-7), and this is the same
> small group that approves these patches.
>
This is the case in several parts of GCC.  The procedure for patch
submission and approval is the same.

> feature working, then the change is checked in
> locally and reviewed by me (I still review all
> Ada front end patches). If it all looks good,
> it migrates into the FSF tree the next day or
> so
>
That is your mistake.  Post the individual patches, have them approved
by your internal maintainer and commit them individually.  Hell, the
approval can even be a mention of an offline approval by such and such
maintainer.  Have both the patch and the approval posted to the external
lists.

It's not hard.  We all do it.  All the time.  I am finding it
increasingly hard to explain these painfully obvious principles to you,
so I will just stop.  Go read contribute.html and then we can clarify
whatever questions you may have regarding patch submission and approval.


Diego.