Re: Lack of Mature Tools (was: Lockheed Martin, Green Hills, etc.)

[Chris Morgan <cm@mihalis.net>]

Robert Dewar <dewar@gnat.com> writes:

> Actually, as far as I can tell, this project did not make use of the
> commercial version of GNAT, but used some unsupported public version
> obtained somewhere from the net (and certainly not from Ada Core
> Technologies). Yes, among the technologies mentioned on the slides,
> it mentions that GNAT is the most stable, but still this is NOT the
> commercial version of GNAT.  In fact we can't even be sure that it
> is the same bits that we originally placed there. The advantage of
> freely available software on the net is precisely that, it is freely
> available, but

You seem to be trying to scare people off using the public version
even if they do not need support because you "can't even be sure that
it is the same bits" you "originally placed there". I think you can,
and also, in particular, I find the following statement to be
misleading :

>the downside is you can never be sure exactly what you are getting.

Are you really suggesting that if I see an announcement of a new
public release of gnat on comp.lang.ada and I then download a file
with that version number from cs.nyu.edu in /pub/gnat that it may
somehow be corrupted? The wrong file? Altered by random strangers?
This seems like a surprising claim to me. I'll bet you (i.e. ACT) can
be pretty sure that those bits correspond exactly to the ACT build of
that public version just with a sum(1). If you published checksums on
www.gnat.com everybody else could be fairly sure as well, no matter
where they actually downloaded the file from. Better checks are also
easily provided (e.g. MD5) as seen on many other open source or free
software projects.

Not doing that is perfectly fine, but claiming the resultant lack of
verifiability leads to authenticity problems seems very weaselly to
me.

The value I found in having an ACT support contract pretty much
started flowing after I got the bits myself and installed them.

Sorry ;^)

Chris

-- 
Chris Morgan <cm at mihalis.net>                  http://mihalis.net