Re: EMACS Ada Mode Maintenance

[john@assen.demon.co.uk.nospam (John McCabe)]

dewar@gnat.com wrote:

>This is to announce that Richard Stallman has formally
>designated Emmanuel Briot as the official maintainer
>of Ada mode for EMACS.

Glad to hear that this decision has finally been made.

>Emmanuel Briot is an employee of Ada Core Technologies,
>but will be doing this work with a GNU hat on,

won't he look a bit silly :-)

>and of course all work will be assigned to
>the Free Software Foundation. Ada Core Technologies is
>happy to make this contribution of effort to the continued
>development of GNU software.

I'd like to thank ACT for assigning their resources to the development
of ada-mode.

>With regard to recent discussions on this newsgroup,
>Richard Stallman's view is that it is proper to give
>precedence to GNAT in the development of this facility,
>since "GNU programs should generally give preference to
>other free software, and especially to other GNU software."

Although I would stand by such a statement, mainly with respect to new
features, there is a subtlety in this quote in that it doesn't state
anywhere that general features of currently available GNU software
should be removed and replaced with product specific code (I refer in
particular of course to the use of gnatstub in ada-make-body). Rather
it seems the norm for additional (alternative/improved) functionality
that uses external tools etc to be added which can be selected through
customisation options etc, in order to allow users without those tools
to still have the functionality they already had. In actal fact, Rolf
Ebert (previous maintainer of ada-mode) once stated that he had
hesitated to put ada-xref.el (which was always very GNAT specific)
into Emacs because of this.

>The policy here will be to include all useful
>contributions, and to provide facilities that are generally
>useful. Certainly there will be no deliberate attempt to
>impede the use of EMACS with Ada compilers other than GNAT,
>no one suggests that would be reasonable, so we expect that
>many of the facilities of Ada mode in EMACS will continue
>to be usable by other compilers. However, in accordance
>with the direction requested by Richard Stallman, providing
>special functionality for use with compilers other than
>GNAT will not be a priority in our continued development
>effort.

Of course I would not expect you to provide functionality for other
compilers, only customisation support to allow the GNAT commands to be
easily changed for other compilers.

All I really ask is that ada-mode.el should at least provide the
functionality it always did without requiring additional packages,
that the ability be included to extend the functionality through such
additional packages (e.g through gnat-mode for example, and that any
language specific (rather than compiler) enhancements be put into
ada-mode.el.

>We will rejuvenate and maintain the EMACS Ada mode mailing
>list, and we will make an announcement here concerning that
>list in the near future. We suggest that further
>discussions of technical details for Ada mode can most
>fruitfully be held on that mailing list.

Excellent.


Best Regards
John McCabe <john@assen.demon.co.uk>