Ada User Reports

[kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen)]

In article <5potsi$fc1@top.mitre.org>, mfb@mbunix.mitre.org (Michael F Brenner) writes:
> The part I agree with is that it would be useful to the entire Ada
> community to see bugs tracked in public, along with the programs
> that failed. The failed programs are actually more useful, because
> they can be used to test other baselines. The hard part is getting
> someone to volunteer their network and disk space and time to keep
> such a useful information system going. The other hard part is
> to have the COMMUNITY test the submissions against all commercial
> and free compilers, analysis tools, year 2000 tools, automatic
> change tools, language-sensitive text editors, metrics tools, 
> reverse engineering tools, re-engineering tools, data flow diagrammers,
> program flow diagrammers, cohesion tools, and coupling tools. Of
> course, the COMMUNITY would then report any thusly discovered bugs
> to their respective tools. Kind of like what the validation suite
> started out to be, but could not become, because the market
> remained too small.  
> 
> I would personally contribute one hour a week to testing on the
> various tools I have on my home PC. Who will donate the network
> and disk space? Who will maintain the reporting site? Who else
> will volunteer to test against various tools as this accumulated
> data grows? Who will update the data as various tools fix their
> bugs? Who will close the bugs for each tool when appropriate?

It seems to me bug reports can only be fully closed by the originator.

Although an independent "consumer reports" activity for Ada tools
would be valuable if it worked, there are plenty of of possible
pitfalls.  It seems to me, however, this is a subject much more
worthy of discussion than a volunteer parallel development effort
on GNAT.

Larry Kilgallen