gnat 3.09 and win32ada

gnat 3.09 and win32ada

[Mitch Gart]

A few months back I made a release of the Win32Ada binding
for GNAT 3.08W, which was the current version of GNAT at that
moment.  (Actually the 'W' means it was a "wavefront" pre-release
version.)  Now there have been several reports of problems with
GNAT 3.09 and Win32Ada.  The problems are:

- one or two package specs need some pragmas moved, to compile

- after compilation some of the test programs that come with 
  Win32Ada don't link.

I currently have no time budget for fixing this but if somebody
out there has fixed the problems in their copy of the sources,
or would like to volunteer to make the fixes, please send them
to me.  That way I will be able to put them up on the Web site so 
they are available to other people from one central place.


- Mitch Gart
- mg@inmet.com

Re: gnat 3.09 and win32ada

[Mitch Gart]

Somebody has sent me a source file that compiles with gnat 3.09, see 
http://www.inmet.com/~mg/win32ada/updates/win32-winnt.ads

It is still reported that some of the test programs have link errors 
using gnat 3.09.  Does anybody have a fix for this problem?


- Mitch 
- mg@inmet.com

Re: gnat 3.09 and win32ada

[Robert Dewar]

Mitch said

<<I currently have no time budget for fixing this but if somebody
out there has fixed the problems in their copy of the sources,
or would like to volunteer to make the fixes, please send them
to me.  That way I will be able to put them up on the Web site so
they are available to other people from one central place.>>

It seems unfortunate that there is no provision for maintaining these
bindings, at least at the level of fixing illegal code. Any binding like
this really needs continuing maintenance, not only for fixing bugs like
this, but also for tracking changes as they occur.

Please note I am not complaining at Mitch. People sometimes expect us to
maintain GNAT for ever free on some dubious basis, and I am certainly not
about to expect Mitch to maintain these bindings free for ever without
funding. However, it does seem that when a project like this is tarted,
provision should be made for continued support.

Here at ACT, we are not particularly interested in taking on the maintenance
for these bindings, given their status as copyrighted proprietary software,
not freely redistributable, and rquiring a license from microsoft for their
use ...

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies