From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,35ce1c7836290812 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@gnat.com Subject: Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long) Date: 1999/03/05 Message-ID: <7bp3ab$vib$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 451619711 References: <7bflkk$78i$1@news.ro.com> <7bhlb2$h4n$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <7bia5u$3lt$1@news.ro.com> <7bkasm$rlt$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <36DE8585.2B5E6A5C@spam.com> <7bmbr5$j3p$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <36DFA6FB.D3A2AD84@spam.com> <7bov12$r8o$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.04 [en] (OS/2; I) X-Http-Proxy: 1.0 x15.dejanews.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 205.232.38.14 Organization: Deja News - The Leader in Internet Discussion X-Article-Creation-Date: Fri Mar 05 17:12:53 1999 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1999-03-05T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article <7bov12$r8o$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>, dennison@telepath.com wrote: > The company I work for makes no secret of using all sorts > of "unsupported" Open Source tools (gcc, emacs, perl, > tk/tcl etc), and apparently makes a pretty good living > for itself doing so. I suspect you'd probably be > hard-pressed to find a fourune 100 company that *didn't* > have someone using a public version of one of those tools > to do production development. Whether you find it useful to use unsupported software depends on your circumstances. Our policy at ACT is not to use unsupported software for any critical purposes, and that is the advice we pass on to our customers. > Generally the support you get from fellow users on usenet > is far superior to what any company could provide. That may be true in general, but certainly our customers do not consider it is true for the support that ACT provides which is certainly NOT what is generally typical in the field. Most certainly Ted cannot make a relevant judgment here since he does not have ACT support. We have certainly seen a number of occasions on which Ted has been frustrated to run into problems that would have been solved immediately if he had support. It all depends on how you value your time, and how much of a problem it is if you run into a blocking problem. > And in > a real pinch, you can go into the source and fix a > problem yourself. That's not really true, not "in a real pinch". Yes it is certainly true that you can support GNAT yourself, and indeed this possibility is important to many of our customers. But there is a learning curve here, and you need people who have some real knowledge of the GNAT sources. The scenario where you run into a problem, and then quick, in emergency mode burrow into the sources. Furthermore if you are selling this as a kind of insurance policy to your management, it is bogus, given the need to ramp up in people and experience before you could effectively solve the problem. Sure there may be limited cases in which this case be done, and often customers for example make fixes or modifications to run time units, but digging into the visibility circuits of the compiler to figure out if a puzzling error message is in fact a bug in GNAT or is a user error, and then fixing it in the former case is not something you can reasonably expect to do in an emergency. > If we do *need* guaranteed support from experts for a > particular project we would be happy to pay for it. Of course one of the things here is that you don't really know whether support would benefit you without trying it out. This is why we discourage people from using the public version of GNAT for evaluation. Instead, get an evaluation contract from us, and evaluate for yourselves how useful support can be. A very large part of our support consists in helping people with problems in their understanding of Ada or GNAT, or how best to use these technologies. We also help people find bugs in their programs in many cases as part of sorting out what is going on. I often see people flailing around on CLA, or chat@gnat.com looking for help on problems that I am certain would be solved quickly by our appropriate expert if they had an ACT support contract. As I say, it all depends on your requirements and needs, and on how valuable your time is. What we often see is serious projects trying to use GNAT without support getting into a mess, and then deciding that the mess means there is a problem with GNAT. Well that may be true in some cases, but nearly always the problems could be eliminated or at least managed in the context of proper support. That's why our position is that basically the public version of GNAT is intended for student and research use. If others find it useful fine, but that is not the audience we are catering to with the public releases. Robert Dewar Ada Core Technologies -----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==---------- http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own