Ada mainline

[Robert Dewar]

D. Starner wrote:

> I get the impression that ACT feels that no one else wants to  
> work on GNAT, that no one is capable of working on GNAT without
> all of ACT's proprietary test suites and everything, and that
> the concerns and problems of users who don't have a contract
> with ACT are without interest. I'm certainly not motivated to
> start working on GNAT, given that ACT is likely to be reviewing
> my patches.

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. 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 (our experience is for
example that it is far easier for students to modify the
GNAT front end than the gcc back end).

The test suites help, but really aren't necessary for doing
work on the front end (certainly the compiler students at
NYU who modify the front end for a semester project don't
use them). In practice, running the ACATS suite is pretty
good (the ACATS suite is certainly more comprehensive than
any publically available suite for C or C++ for example).
As part of our review of any patch, we most certainly
would run the DEC Test suite and our proprietary test
suite, but you don't need that to do fixes, improvements
etc.

It's not that problems and concerns of users who don't
have a contract with ACT are without interest, it is
simply that they have a far lower priority. The people
who do have contracts support the several dozen full
time engineers working on GNAT, so that is a natural
assignment of priority. We have in fact incorporated
a significant number of patches to GNAT from FSF,
though they have mostly been of things in the obvious
category.