Re: EMACS Ada Mode Maintenance

[dewar@gnat.com]

In article <79edut$cup$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
  briot@gnat.com wrote:

  <<send your patches>>

Just to clarify here: patches that are of general use for
Ada, and relevant to its use on GNAT are definitely
welcome. Patches that work ONLY for some proprietary
compiler are contentious. I doubt Richard Stallman would
be willing to approve such patches for inclusion in the
official EMACS sources, so such patches are probably not
appropriate. This does not of course mean that it is in
any way wrong, or inappropriate, or undesirable that such
patches should be created, just that the GNU project itself
does not support this kind of activity (for fairly clearly
understandable reasons!)

So patches that are specific to some other compiler should
probably be managed by the vendor of that compiler as an
optional addition. Note that with EMACS, such plug-in
additions are of course easy to do, and do not typically
require recompilation or reinstallation of EMACS.

I am doing my best to interpret Richard Stallman's intent
here (his actual language in private messages to me with
respect to proprietary compilers was quite definite. I
commented to him that there had been some discussions about
support of other compilers, but they seem to be resolved,
and he objected to any attempt to "placate" the users of
other compilers, on the grounds that this had nothing to do
with the GNU project).

I think it is useful to keep this in perspective. Both
EMACS and GNAT are part of the GNU project. It is thus
quite natural that EMACS be specially aware of the
requirements of GNAT.

As I said in an earlier note, the GNU project is not going
to go out of its way to make EMACS inconvenient to use for
other compilers, but it certainly will not make special
attempts in the other direction.

I hope this clarification is useful. There seemed to be
some concerns in this thread earlier on that it was somehow
inappropriate for GNAT to be creating a GNAT-specific
version of Ada mode, and that this was not the official
version and was therefore somehow unhelpful. Hopefully
Richard Stallman's views on this matter are now clear,
as well as ours.

In any case, I think in practice the outcome of this
development will be continued improvement of Ada mode for
EMACS that will benefit all users of this very useful
technology, and we welcome contributions.

Emmanuel will shortly be posting an announcement here
reminding people about the EMACS Ada mode mailing list,
and will also be releasing an updated version of the EMACS
Ada mode sources in the very near future (his plan is to
have frequent updates and releases of this technology).

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==----------
http://www.dejanews.com/       Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own