Re: Provisional Standards was RE: Ada.Networks.Sockets hierarchy (Provisional Standard?)

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

I would be interested in working on a standard library for Ada (outside 
the ARM, but considered "Conventional" or "Provisional") However I have 
a couple of reasonable restrictions:

1) We would be totally wasting our time unless we could get some kind of 
acceptance from the folks who could put a label on it that says 
"Official" in some manner. There's some committee covering the Ada 
standard that should be contacted. There are a handful of vendors out 
there that have some level of interest in continuing to develop & 
promote their Ada compilers. They should be contacted. If they say 
"Yeah, we'll work with you on requirements, stamp as "Official" whatever 
you produce and see to it that it gets distributed with the 
compilers...." then you've got something worth working on. Anything else 
is going to be a failure. Trying to get approval and acceptance on 
something like this *after* it gets built won't happen. If it will, why 
hasn't it already happened with one or more of the existing libraries?

2) I am willing to do *some* level of work strictly out of the kindness 
of my heart and desire to see Ada benefit, but I don't think that level 
of effort is going to produce anything more than a few toys. If we want 
to build a *serious* and *credible* library for Ada, it isn't going to 
happen unless there is some money involved somewhere along the line. I 
think a scheme could be set up that would make the production of a 
conventional Ada library something that would pay off. I have some ideas 
about how that could work. What I believe is this: If there isn't some 
payment either up front or down the road, nobody is going to devote much 
time to it and all you'll get is some smallish body of mostly 
unsupported stuff. If it can be somehow turned into a product that 
produces some paychecks somewhere along the line, you can then 
continually grow it into something truly useful and spend time 
supporting it so that developers will feel comfortable using it.

I've got some ideas how this could be made to work. Contact me if you'd 
like to talk more about it off line.

MDC

Warren W. Gay VE3WWG wrote:

I know there is some casual interest, but is there any real interest
in starting a "formal project"?   Or is there an existing one that
people should be "pointed to"?



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Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jast.mil/

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         --  Voltaire
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