Re: A bug in gnat/gcc 3.3.3?

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic.brenta@insalien.org>]

Martin Krischik wrote:
> Adrian Hoe wrote:
>> Is 3.4 less buggy then 3.3.x as suggested in your website?
> 
> Yes! 3.4 is currently the best option. 3.15 is old, 3.3 is buggy and
> 4.0 is still fighting with the tree-saa extentsion.

I differ with this.  The quality of GCC 3.4 is similar to, but not
significantly better than that of GNAT 3.15p.  Also, 3.4 is much
slower and memory-hungry than 3.15p (it may or may not matter to you
but it's a fact). More importantly, GCC 3.4 does not have ASIS or
GLADE.  Until this changes, I still think that GNAT 3.15p is the best
choice as the foundation of a complete Ada development and runtime
environment.  It is important to use only one version of GNAT, because
this makes it possible to distribute programs and shared libraries
that are binary-compatible with each other.  The lack of ASIS and
GLADE for GCC 3.4 restricts the set of packages that can be made in
this way.

The one area where GCC 3.4 is better than GNAT 3.15p is mixed-language
development in Ada and C++ (Ada and C work nicely in 3.15p though).

I agree that 3.3 is buggy and 4.0 not ready yet.

>> Why not prebuild packages (rpm, tar balls, pkg, etc.) and make
>> available for download for a small fee (for the time and trouble
>> the builder has invested)? Or, make into CDs and charge for a small
>> fee.
> 
> For MinGW there is a nice 3.4.2. Apart from that: Yes I would love
> that. And I am prepared to pay as well.

Debian has prebuilt packages for gnat 3.15p, gnat-3.2, gnat-3.3 and
gnat-3.4.  The packages conflict with each other (i.e. you can install
only one of them), because they all provide /usr/bin/gnatmake and
friends.  gnat and gnat-3.4 even provide shared Ada libraries.

>> Yes, this is contradict to the idea of free software. But getting
>> the right package or right build for one's system is a tedious
>> process.
> 
> Actualy: No! Only source is free in free software. Charging for
> binaries is quite common (SuSE, Redhad, Mandrake, etc. pp.)

And the FSF does not distribute binaries of most of its popular
software, e.g. GCC, GDB, or ddd.  Binary distributions are often left
as an exercise to the reader :)

>> Why not setup a non-profit org to do this? The fee collected can be
>> channeled back to Ada development and as well as Ada promotion?
>> Interested? Contact me at my email or website.
> 
> Shure I am. BTW: Once you have the setup for Ada it's only a tiny
> step to distribute all gcc-core languages.

Such non-profit organisations already exist, and you can get CD's from
them today.  Gentoo, Debian and AIDE (for Windows) come to mind.  Even
better: you can contribute to improve them.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.