Re: Gnat Free ?

[dewarr@my-dejanews.com]

In article <87soglbhwu.fsf@yakisoba.forte-intl.com>,
  Ronald Cole <ronald@forte-intl.com> wrote:
> dewarr@my-dejanews.com writes:
> > We think it is in the best interests of the Ada community and the GNAT
project
> > to ensure that the public versions of GNAT that are distributed are as free
> > as possible from glitches that will cause unsupported users to run into
> > trouble. We think that it is better to wait, and perhaps be a little behind
> > the latest-and-greatest, rather than deal with glitches.
>
> Just judging from the HPPA optimizer bugs in 3.09 (and the fact that they
> went unfixed in 3.10p), you've been having problems meeting your own goal.

Indeed, it is not always easy to make the balace between when to release and
when to delay. We try to get the best balance possible. If we waited till we
were 100% sure that there were no bugs at all, you would never see a new
release! It is pretty difficult to satisfy everyone when it comes to the
public release timing. So far we have been pretty successful in achieving the
right balance, and we are trying to do the same for 3.11p.

As for the optimizer bugs that Ronald refers to, they were not causing trouble
for our customers, so fixing them was not a priority, if in fact they existed.
We do look at bug reports from non-supported users of GNAT, and many problems
have been reported by non-supported users of GNAT, and subsequently fixed, but
of necessity these reports have lower priority than customer problems.

> > We certainly have never "threatened to consider not doing
> > business with any one who starts giving out wavefront". That is
> > pure fantasy on the part of Ronald Cole.
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>
> It's certinly ironic that the post you claim is "pure fantasy" is
> archived at dejanews...  Took me all of 5 minutes to find, too.

Nope, no such event is archived anywhere, since it has never happened, not
once, not ever, never! There was a discussion on CLA that pointed out that
it was perfectly within the spirit and the letter of the GPL to ask people not
to distribute particular versions of a GPL'ed product on the basis that the
versions were not yet in appropriate form for public release, and then to
refuse to give them future versions if they did not acceed to reasonable
requests. This is indeed true. However, for RC to extrapolate this theoretical
possibility into a claim of actual action by ACT, is entirely unjustified.
Ronald, you have no evidence of this ever having happened, and it is
inappropriate for you to be making this damaging claim in the absence of such
evidence!

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

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