"Marin David Condic" wrote in message news:3F88A577.5000803@noplace.com... > A license is something to worry about down the road. That's something > the vendors would have to say something about anyway. At this point I'm > concerned about the idea expressed by Robert Eachus that a Conventional > Ada Library be a branch (or several) under the standard library "Ada". > That is, "Ada.Containers" and "Ada.Statistics" and so on. This would be > a wonderful thing since it provides something really natural. Except > that under "normal" rules you are not allowed to extend the package > "Ada" and you may not have everything you need to do it if you could. > That's why I'm objecting. Put it under a separate library or change the > rules for the "Ada" tree so that this is possible to extend and required > that you get source. > > At this point, I'm just stating a perceived requirement that is > something near and dear to my heart - and possibly others: For a > Conventional Ada Library, I want to get the source code and I want to be > able to modify/extend it at will with no special limitations. (Much like > any of the existing container libraries floating around out there.) If > Robert Eachus or someone else who is smarter than me (And Robert really > is *way* smarter than me! :-) can figure out some rule change for the > package "Ada" that gets me this requirement, I'm happy as a pig in > fewmets. :-) If that's not possible, then I think a Conventional Ada > Library ought to exist under its own tree. *** Would we need to stipulate that all you do need to do is rename it to make it part of the ada hiearchy? as in make sure you just globally rename it and it still works exactly the same? or do you not see a situation where this might be conflicting with anything already existing into ada? Basically treat CAL as Ada when naming libraries and at that point possibly making a copy of the Ada hierarchy into the CAL database to make sure they can't be named the same? If there's no imminent problems, than that idea is fine with me :-). let's see what others think. > > I suppose that Robert's suggestion about renamings might be a good > compromise. Make some "Official" root (Let's call it "CAL") and start > adding branches (like "CAL.Containers" and "CAL.Statistics") They go > through some editor/publisher to make sure they meet requirements and > are released with everyone's compiler in full Ada source. If at a later > date, the ARG decides that, e.g. CAL.Containers, ought to be part of the > Ada standard, you just do a "renames" to Ada.Containers (keeping the > original) and now it is a fully standard, entirely official part of Ada, > complete with its own chapter in the ARM and a full validation suite. > That seems like something that ought to work reasonably well. Do you > think? (It might have problems if it still exists in CAL and the > end-user can modify it. Leave that to the language lawyers to sort out. > *That* problem is *waaaaaay* down the road. We can burn that bridge when > we get to it.) *** Yes I believe that's a good way to go about it. Licenses will be licenses when they are licenses :-) . > > MDC -- St�phane Richard "Ada World" Webmaster http://www.adaworld.com