From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,13b7917466f2d19 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2001-10-06 07:39:01 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!postnews1.google.com!not-for-mail From: dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: GNAT and GCC 3.0 Date: 6 Oct 2001 07:39:01 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com/ Message-ID: <5ee5b646.0110060639.31567261@posting.google.com> References: <9a575af3.0110020747.2304ce86@posting.google.com> <5ee5b646.0110022002.7ccde025@posting.google.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 205.232.38.14 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1002379141 26591 127.0.0.1 (6 Oct 2001 14:39:01 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 6 Oct 2001 14:39:01 GMT Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:13832 Date: 2001-10-06T14:39:01+00:00 List-Id: Ronald Cole wrote in message news:... > I remember offering to help since I was able to patch > 3.11p to compile itself with gcc-2.95, Well it was easy enough to do a patch that would sort of allow 3.11 to work with gcc-2.95, but the result was hopeless from an Ada point of view, since 2.95 had so many serious unfixed bugs that might not have affected g++ so much, but really resulted in a completely unusable Ada port (as evidenced by a huge number of failures in our test suites). A major part of the effort in getting GNAT to some resaonable level of compatibility with gcc was to check in thousands of lines of patches to fix these deficiencies in 2.95 (many of these were 2.8.1 patches that had never made it to 2.95). That work is reasonably complete, and although the current checked in sources are still not at the point where we feel that a reliable commercial product (or public release) can be generated from this version of the sources, we are definitely getting nearer. Internally at ACT, we are working on identifying the remaining problems and fixing them (as is normal, the issue is not so much fixing the problems, as identifying why some giant test case is not working -- and these test cases are mostly proprietary code, so this is something we have to work on). As we work out the necessary fixes, they will eventually be reflected in the sources at gnu.org, and eventually we may be able to bring our internal tree into very close correspondence with the one at gnu.org (right now our primary internal tree is still 2.8.1 based, since that is still the only fully reliable version). > but you wouldn't cut loose with your precious > "wave front" sources back then. It's not a matter of precious, but in our judgment, it would have been quite unhelpful to release random sets of sources which had not been fully field tested. The sources at gnu.org are of quite a different character, and it is important to understand that, unlike the commercial releases of GNAT, they have not successfully passed our internal quality testing. The good thing about the sources being at gnu.org is that it allows the general community to contribute more effectively, but it is important to understand that the consequence is that there can be multiple versions of GNAT around from this source and you need to be definitely aware of what you are getting and what you can expect from it in terms of quality and reliability. ACT will continue to release commercial versions of GNAT that have been through all our quality procedures, and at least for a limited set of targets, will follow along with corresponding public releases, to be available on our libre site at www.act-europe.fr Eventually, we will get the ACATS test suite set up as part of the gnu.org material, as well as a selected set of ACT tests that we wrote and which can be distributed. That will help ensure that the gnu.org version stays coherent. We also will move towards a situation where people will be able to build GNAT to check that their gcc patches do not upset its integrity, but of course there is no guarantee that any given days snapshots are fully reliable. Robert Dewar