Re: JAVA and ADA JGNAT

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>]

In article <87n1pswjz0.fsf@deneb.cygnus.argh.org>,
  Florian Weimer <fw@s.netic.de> wrote:
> I've misread this statement, I think.  The explanation by
Robert Dewar
> that followed but which I neglected to quote made it quite
clear that
> he meant that most of the code Cygnus develops for their
customers
> never makes it into the public GCC version, and this seems to
be true.
>
> On the other hand, the development process of the *public* GCC
version
> hosted by Cygnus is much more open than the GNAT development
process.


The GNAT development process inside ACT clearly corresponds to
the internal development at Cygnus, with one important
difference which is that EVERYTHING we do at ACT makes it into
the next public release of GNAT. That's always been true, and
will continue to be true.

Now what is missing is a public tree for GNAT that people could
play with. Note that until very recently, the same was true
for GDB, and it is definitely a disadvantage for GDB, why?
Because a substantial amount of GDB development is going on
outside Cygnus, and there needs to be a public tree which can
act as the focus for this distributed development. It is also
no secret that the intention is to establish a council for
GDB, similar to the council for GCC (in fact I acted as convenor
for the first couple of organizational meetings).

With GNAT, the development so far has gone on pretty much
entirely within ACT, and no other companies until quite
recently have got involved. This means that there has not
been the push to get a public tree going that existed with
GDB (a group of nine or so full time people working on GDB
at a company like HP is a considerably different story from
a couple of hobbyists who would like to hack around with GNAT
on a part time basis).

Nevertheless, it certainly seems desirable to have a public
tree, and as part of the GNU project, we have decided to center
this effort around GNU/Linux, which is why the GNAT/Linux team
seems the right organization to do this. It's making slow
progress partly because we are talking about people working in
their spare time, and partly because it won't really work nicely
until GNAT is fully merged into the new FSF version of GCC,
something that, as I said, we are working on!

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies


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