Re: Towards a free GNU Ada

[fielding@kiwi.ics.uci.edu (Roy T. Fielding)]

In <5potsi$fc1@top.mitre.org> mfb@mbunix.mitre.org (Michael F Brenner) writes:

>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?

I think you are right on the mark, but it is also important not to
try to do too much at once.  The most difficult thing, aside from finding
volunteers, is setting up the archive such that many people can edit
it remotely, and without the pain of remote interaction.  That means
setting up a shared repository with the equivalent of remote CVS access,
using something like SSH to enable access via public key, and maintaining
three mailing lists (announcements, discussion, and repository-changes).
I would also add Apache+PTS to provide Web and e-mail interfaces to a
problem tracking system.  In essence, this is the same setup required to
run a community-developed software project, which is no surprise given
that an archive is just another form of software.

Someone with a long-term commitment to Ada95 would be needed to
setup and administrate the site.  Note, however, that it doesn't
have to be the same person/organization that is maintaining the archive.

....Roy