From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.8 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_DATE autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,45cf1fc1b1a9dade X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 1994-11-20 14:05:26 PST Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Path: nntp.gmd.de!xlink.net!news.dfn.de!Germany.EU.net!EU.net!uunet!news.cygnus.com!shebs From: shebs@cygnus.com (Stan Shebs) Subject: Re: GNAT for Mac? In-Reply-To: dewar@cs.nyu.edu's message of 19 Nov 1994 12:07:16 -0500 Message-ID: Sender: news@cygnus.com Nntp-Posting-Host: rtl.cygnus.com Organization: Cygnus Support References: <3aipsv$pgr@info.epfl.ch> <3albc4$9g3@gnat.cs.nyu.edu> Date: Sun, 20 Nov 1994 22:05:26 GMT Date: 1994-11-20T22:05:26+00:00 List-Id: In article <3albc4$9g3@gnat.cs.nyu.edu> dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes: Laurent Gasser is spreading a common piece of misinformation when he incorrectly conjectures that the lack of a MAC port of GCC (and hence GNAT) is due to the LPF boycott of Apple (which is in any case, as far as I know, ended). I believe it's still officially in place. I will consider it ended when Apple's name is removed from the "fight look and feel" section of the GCC manual. I just looked at a bit of the change history, and that section has changed substantially in the past few months, as shown by our CVS repository, although none of the changes are documented in GCC's ChangeLog. For instance, Xerox is no longer mentioned by name, even though the previous justification for boycotting it was that although its lawsuit had been thrown out, "Xerox has not said anything to indicate it wouldn't try again". (Perhaps I missed a recent announcement?) The one and only reason that there is no version of GCC for GNAT is that no one has done the port. There is nothing stopping anyone from doing this port [were the boycott in place, the port would not be included in the standard FSF distribution, but so what, lots of important ports of GCC, including for example the popular EMX port for OS/2) are not distributed by FSF. Of course it's nice to have everything in the main distribution, but you can't in any case distribute what doesn't exist, and in this case it is more to the point to worry about how to get the port to exist, than to worry about how it is distributed when it does exist! This is all true, but from a practical point of view, maintaining branches in parallel is very expensive and time-consuming. It's very easy for a casual change by an FSF maintainer to break a a port not maintained by the FSF (it happened to me many times at Apple). A fully compatible native Mac port is more complex than for DOS or OS/2, although it's probably simpler for Ada than for C (Mac C compilers must support a number of exotic extensions to ANSI C). THe history is that there was a GCC version 1 port for the MAC, done I think by someone at Apple. But this port ran under MPW, so it was of limited use. By moi, to be exact. :-) There is also a version 2 port to MPW, and there are versions that run under Unix emulators like MacMiNT, so you *can* get versions that don't need MPW, although they are not yet sufficient for production use. Note that Cygnus is interested in selling support for GCC, so your interest is more interesting to them if you are need to use MAC/GCC or MAC/GNAT for serious work requiring commercial support :-) Amen to that! We're neither a charity, nonprofit, nor government agency, so you have to wave actual dollars, in sufficient numbers to fund whatever work you'd like to see. Note also that if you're waiting for someone *else* to fund the work, and they're waiting for *you* to fund the work, nothing gets accomplished. Stan Shebs Cygnus Support shebs@cygnus.com