Re: Outside view (still): Development process in the Ada community

[dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)]

"Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org> wrote in message news:<a9ppc5$fve$1@nh.pace.co.uk>...
> Other than issues of time and money, I don't see why it 
> *can't* work. Here's the thing: I could put up a web page 
> and declare myself the Informal Ada Conventions 
> Consortium and declare "Henceforth, the following 
> packages are considered to be Official IACC standards and 
> all Ada implementations need to include them in order to > be  conformant!" What weight does it carry?

Well none at all of course. And one thing to realize is
that the ISO process does not have some external legitimacy. It
derives legitimacy from reflecting input
of vendors and serious Ada users. If you can't get vendors
or serious Ada users to buy in, you should not imagine
that you can persuade ISO to issue standards for things
that do not have this kind of interest level.

You certainly can't go to ISO and say, "look, we don't seem
to be able to get any vendors or major Ada users interested, but those
folks who post on CLA are really
enthusiastic".

On the other hand actual useful implementations are definitely a way
to generate such interest, and that
remains the best way to make progress.

An interesting precedent here is the attempt to pseudo-standardize the
Win32 bindings in the ARA
environment. There just was not enough interest to
overcome the problems.

One thing to realize is that official conformance and validation has
largely disappeared as a major concern. The
validation process itself has now been relaxed so that basically all
that needs to happen is a vendor says that
they pass the tests, pay some money, and you get a certificate. ACT
views this kind of validation as pretty
meaningless, and if we do further validations they will
be in the old style with on-site verification.

In fact, while we certainly find it very useful to run the
ACATS tests (we run them every night on all targets and make sure that
we pass them), we see almost no demand for
formal validation.

What I think would be most useful is to generate new bindings and
useful packages. Quite a few people (like Tom and Ted and Florian and
Michael and others -- I am not trying to make a complete list here,
and I would never succeeed) have put in effort on this, and that seems
to
be by far the best use of energy.