Re: gnat-3.10

[rodemann@mathematik.uni-ulm.de (Joerg Rodemann)]

Robert Dewar (dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu) wrote:
> Ronald says

> Incidentally Richard Stallman is definitely supportive of the notion of
> not releasing free software before it is in an appropriate state. The
> Linux folks have often argued that the Linux distributes should contain
> the latest GCC snapshots, since obviously they fix bugs, but such an
> attitude is not a good idea in the long run.

> This is simply a matter of quality control, which seems in our judgment
> to be as important for public releases of GNAT as it is for any other
> customer releases that we make.

In my opinion this is a very good point you made. Especially as Ada is ---
at least in our mindset --- strongly connected with Software Quality or
Quality Software. Certainly with Ada you could do the same crippled type
of software one often finds in projects using C, C++ or else. At least the
end users often seem not to care about anything like quality. Although they
mutter if somethings goes wrong or worse (system crash, harddisk overwrite).

So I believe it serves the Ada community very well if you provide us (and I'd
like to thank you for making it publicly available to us) with a solid version
of GNAT. this most probably will prohibit opinions and sensations that "Ada
is not useful" just because the compiler is not good work. Surely we often
hear these beliefs about Ada-83 in this group. As to the latest releases of
any software my favourite route is: if you really need a new feature or you
desire it like hell, try out the new ones. Otherwise stick to the running
version until another one seems to be of the same quality. A collegue of mine
is just fiddling around with his systems just because software X requires 
the latest release from Y which only runs in combination with the newest
--- and totally incompatible --- release of Z. It gets really annoying if
Y or Z are essential parts of a system like the OS itself or the development
system.

Greetings

Joerg


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rodemann@mathematik.uni-ulm.de | Dipl.-Phys. Joerg S. Rodemann
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