Re: A proposal for Debian policy for Ada

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Tue, 18 May 2010 02:53:05 -0700 (PDT), Ludovic Brenta wrote:

> 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.

But didn't I solve at least the problem of Linux enumeration? (:-))

>> [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.

Yes, but I hope newbies do not maintain GNAT distributions...

> 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).

OK, I agree. The web distance is not 0. Isn't 1? I.e. any Linux GNAT
maintainer is known to somebody in c.l.a?

> 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.

They certainly will, if a project of unification starts, organized as a
body similar to ARG. It could also be a good place for reporting
language-specific GNAT bugs and fixes, before they go to GCC.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de