Re: Gnat Free ?

[dewar@gnat.com]

In article <36280492.55B6D77C@bellsouth.net>,
  The Ludwig Family <ludwigs@bellsouth.net> wrote:
> Since students are key recipients of the public version of GNAT and I am
> often involved in teaching Ada in both an educational and an industrial
> environment with training operating on a typical academic calendar, it surely
> would be helpful if new public releases could come out early August if the
> intent is to have them be annual.  Then instructors and system administrators
> could be set up and ready to go with the latest public release at the start
> of the academic year.  Switching versions in mid-term does not make sense, at
> least in my environment.  I know that various events can preclude good
> intentions, and the emphasis on quality needs to dominate; also, your paying
> customers have far more right than the non-paying academic world to direct
> what the contents of the next release should be and when it is needed.  Given
> those caveats, it would be nice, and most appreciated by the academic
> community, if possible, to aim for early August.

First, thanks for your nice note :-)

Yes, we fully realize this, and our intention was indeed that 3.11p be
released in time for the fall semester. But sometimes the "best laid plans of
mice and men gang aft agley" [a Burns quote I learned in school and never
forgot :-) Note that in this case it was not a matter of paid customers
coming first, since the real issue was getting out 3.11b for customers (3.11p
will follow almost immediately). We do have 3.11b out for some targets, but
not all, and we are working furiously to get both the final 3.11b and 3.11p
releases out for Tri^H^H^HSig-Ada). The delay has been in GDB and other
aspects for NT, which now look to be in very good shape, we are in final
testing stages now.

I know this has been a bit of a frustrating wait, especially for those wanting
to use ASIS with the public version (since there was no public release of
ASIS for 3.10, it just wasn't ready on time). But pretty soon the wait should
be over, and we think you will find that the wait was worth it. GNAT 3.11
technology has a lot of improvements, and several very nice new tools, as well
as a much improved debugger.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

P.S. The 3.11p releases will include a version for Redhat 5.0 (thus
eliminating one FAQ from this group), and also a version for Solaris x86.

P.P.S. Another reason for the delay was that we have also been working on
validation issues. As you know, GNAT was the first compiler to achieve full
100% validation with ACVC 2.1 (core and all annexes), on VMS, and we are
planning to extend the list of ACVC 2.1 validations very shortly.

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