Re: Reporting gnat bugs (was: Gnat 3.11 whinings)

[dewar@gnat.com]

In article <1999Jan28.163826.1@eisner>,
  Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam wrote:

> Defects which are (potentially) user-visible are more
> important than those which cannot be detected by the
> user.
>
> It can be difficult to prove that a defect cannot be
> detected by the user, but proving the affirmative by
> example is trivial, if you have the example.

Yes, exactly.

When a user reports a bug that raises its importance. The
primary difference for us in handling reports from
supported and non-supported users is the following:

1. For supported users, we are happy, often at great length
to explain how to use GNAT and how to use Ada 95, and offer
any advice we can on how to make their projects succeed.
This is service that we cannot provide for unsupported
users.

2. For defect reports, the importance of a problem is not
affected by whether someone is supported, but the *urgency*
most certainly is. For supported customers, we immediately
work to figure out work arounds, and/or correct the defect,
and/or explain why it is not a defect as quickly as
possible. For non-supported customers, defect reports may
wait a considerable while to be processed, especially if
they do not appear to be of a critical nature (which is in
fact true for most such reports).

So the bottom line here is that reporting a bug to us is
always useful in establishing the importance of the
problem, and can only help to improve future releases for
both supported and unsupported users.

Indeed the experimentation and academic research use of the
public version of GNAT has over the years been an important
source of input. This is part of the synergy of open source
software. Unsupported users help find problems before
supported users using the software for mission critical
applications run into those problems, and in general the
larger user community means that the product matures faster
for everyone.

In retrospect, for Ada 83, one of the unfortunate things
was that the user communities for early versions of Ada 83
technology, with the possible exception of Ada/Ed, were
small, and so the technologies matured more slowly. I think
anyone looking at the history here would see that Ada 95
compilation technology has matured faster than we saw in
Ada 83. Part of this is just second-time-around, but a lot
of it is the more open distribution of Ada 95 compilers.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

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