Re: GNAT 3.07 MsDos/DJGPP bug report to whom?

[kenner@lab.ultra.nyu.edu (Richard Kenner)]

In article <62lnnk$gv2@fg70.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de> Thomas.Koenig@ciw.uni-karlsruhe.de writes:
>In comp.lang.ada, swhalen@netcom.com (Steve Whalen) wrote:
>
>>(assuming that someone even attempts to port GNAT 3.10 to MsDos)
>
>One group which might take up that task is the egcs group
>(http://www.cygnus.com/egcs/).  I don't know wether anybody is working
>on an MS-DOS version of egcs, and there's only been some very prelimiary
>work of integrating GNAT 3.10.  Still, it won't hurt to ask.

It won't hurt to ask, but I think it would be very bad if they said
"yes"!

The egcs project started out with a very valid and well-defined
purpose: to provide a framework where very experimental patches to GCC
can be developed and debugged without slowing down mainstream GCC
development (which is normally fast paced).  That's a very worthwhile
goal and something that is very achievable.

However, over time, it seems like egcs has become a "kitchen sink"
project.  For example, a lot of the g77 work has moved there.  And
yes, they are also fiddling with GNAT somewhat.

The more this trend continues, the more egcs will have lost its focus.
It will become harder and harder to manage this project in a way that
will produce anything of value to anybody other than the fiddlers who
are working with the compilers.

Moving into working on a language-specific run-time library for what
is essentially an obsolete system seems a very large distraction for
that project.

>The main problem of porting GNAT to egcs is the lack of a good test
>suite.  Anybody care to donate one? :-)

Well, there's ACVC.  That's a reasonably good test of tasking, but is a
poor test of an Ada backend.