Re: Studying and Maintaining GNAT, Is There Any Interest in a New Group?

[Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>]

Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org> writes:
> I'm far from expert on GCC procedures, but all three of the Ada
> front-end maintainers (see [1]) are AdaCore employees, and I don't think
> you're going to get approval for updates to Ada internals from anyone
> else.

Unless you've got some particular reason to believe that (e.g. based on
experience submitting patches), I tend to be skeptical.  Most FOSS
projects love getting good patches (patches that work, are tested,
conform to the project's standards and interfaces, etc.)  What they
don't like is "homework assignments", i.e. someone else coming along and
telling them to do some work (unless they are a paying customer of
course).  

I haven't been involved with GNAT at all, but I've contributed to GCC
and have found the maintainers to generally be receptive to patches
where the submitter is the one who does the work, and they're at least
somewhat willing to advise about what work is needed.  What they don't
want is "please implement feature X" or even "here is my crappy patch,
please clean it up, test it, rework it so it fits the rest of the
codebase, etc., all for free".  That's what support contracts are for.

When it's a clean patch that really improves things and includes all
necessary documentation and tests, it is usually smooth sailing.