Re: A proposal for Debian policy for Ada

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

Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote on comp.lang.ada:
> On Tue, 18 May 2010 04:00:40 -0400, Stephen Leake wrote:
>> "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mail...@dmitry-kazakov.de> writes:
>
>>> BTW, is it possible to have one united Ada policy for all Linux
>>> distributions?
>
>> First you have to enumerate "all Linux distributions"; I don't know how
>> to do that.
>
> That's simple: all distributions having GNAT on the list. (In effect GNAT
> is the only Linux Ada compiler)

You have reduced the problem to a smaller sub-problem but not solved
the sub-problem, thereby showing that it is not as "simple" as you
claim it is.

>>> Linux Ada community is small, all people are known.
>
>> Known to whom?
>
> to anybody reading c.l.a?

>>> Can't we use this as an advantage here?
>
>> It might be possible, if we can get everyone together.
>
>> Certainly Linux distributions that are derived from Debian should simply
>> use the Debian Ada policy.
>
>> We could define "Linux Ada community" as "people who respond to this
>> post"; that is at least a practical working definition. I doubt it
>> matches reality.
>
> [Wondering] Is it possible that there exist GNAT distribution maintainers,
> who do not read c.l.a? They must be experienced Ada programmers in order to
> be able to do that job. There is not that many other Ada resources on the
> Web. I would be happy if there were a conspiracy for Ada, driven by some
> top secret agents, but a more realistic hypothesis is that "we" indeed know
> these people.

The Linux Ada community is small but still larger than the
comp.lang.ada community; there are many web forums where newbies who
have never heard of Usenet ask questions about Ada and GNAT on GNU/
Linux.

In the thread "One united Ada policy for all Linux distributions?" I
enumerated the GNAT distribution maintainers that I know about; you
will see that few of them read comp.lang.ada (of if they do, they are
very silent about it).

Personally I think they should participate on comp.lang.ada if only
occasionally to make their work known.  But the fact is they don't.

--
Ludovic Brenta.