Re: Open source Ada OS?

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

anon wrote on comp.lang.ada:
> Most open OS that use CVS/SVN/GIT are based on BSD or LINUX or the AT&T
> old OS system.
>
> And before complaining about Ada OSs, remember Linux is a single file
> and to obtain its source, one must download a single archived file. Linux
> does not use CVS/SVN/GIT.

You seem to live back in 2003. Linus Torvalds created git specifically
so he could maintain the sources of Linux. The Linux developers have
been using git exclusively since then. See http://git.kernel.org.

> As for MaTRE/Openravencar/RTERM are OS for Real_Time applications with
> usage of Posix design. And all three of these OS have some of the build-in
> libraries written in C based on the Utah OSKIT. So, these OSs may share the
> design concept of openSource but they do not care to spend their time in
> maintaining a source tree as other openSource OS do. Because when a
> maintainer changes one line in a source file to fix a bug it may cause
> changes in 100s of other files. So to maintain the correctness of the OS it is
> better bundle the source files into a single archived file and this process
> decreases the maintaining and download time as well as traffic cost.

If changing one file implies changing 100 other files, then the
software is badly designed. That has nothing to do with whether a
version control system should or should not be used. Note that proper
VCSs treat the entire source tree as one entity, so they allow you to
record changes to 100 files in one atomic operation. Git, Monotone,
Bazaar, Mercurial, Fossil all have this property. Heck, even
Subversion has it.

> And not all of the openSource OS are GCC version 2 or 3 some have modified
> GCC or modified BSD or even their own license that may require the person
> downloading to accept the license before downloading.

So?

> If you look at sourceforge you will see a lot of packages do not fully use the
> CVS/SVN concept due to the fact that the maintainer choose not to. That way
> if you download a package you are suppose to get all files required including
> the license.

Tarballs are OK but not required.
A version control system is OK but not required.
Having both is good.

> And a final note: openSource is a great concept but it is not a Prefect
> concept. Because there is no Perfect concept only what works for that
> group of designer at that time. And CVS/SVN/GIT is not perfect either
> it is just what some use todays to obtain files.

No, it is not "just" to obtain files. A version control system is
supposed to control the versioning(!). With a version control system,
you can obtain the software before it is officially released as
tarballs, you can use bisection to find when a bug was introduced, you
can backport bug fixes. You cannot do these things with "just" a
tarball.

> Its better to just download the package instead of complaining about hot it storage on the
> hosting computer.

It is better only if the release tarballs are complete and free of
bugs and if you do not need any functionality that has not been
released yet.

--
Ludovic Brenta.