Re: Towards a free GNU Ada

[mfb@mbunix.mitre.org (Michael F Brenner)]

The part I agree with is that it would be useful to the entire Ada
community to see bugs tracked in public, along with the programs
that failed. The failed programs are actually more useful, because
they can be used to test other baselines. The hard part is getting
someone to volunteer their network and disk space and time to keep
such a useful information system going. The other hard part is
to have the COMMUNITY test the submissions against all commercial
and free compilers, analysis tools, year 2000 tools, automatic
change tools, language-sensitive text editors, metrics tools, 
reverse engineering tools, re-engineering tools, data flow diagrammers,
program flow diagrammers, cohesion tools, and coupling tools. Of
course, the COMMUNITY would then report any thusly discovered bugs
to their respective tools. Kind of like what the validation suite
started out to be, but could not become, because the market
remained too small.  

I would personally contribute one hour a week to testing on the
various tools I have on my home PC. Who will donate the network
and disk space? Who will maintain the reporting site? Who else
will volunteer to test against various tools as this accumulated
data grows? Who will update the data as various tools fix their
bugs? Who will close the bugs for each tool when appropriate?