Re: GNAT tracking #s

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Peter Herman wrote

"Robert, after transition from GNAT to ACT you seem to no longer assign
tracking numbers to feedback-contributions of unsupported users of GNAT.
(I intentionally omit the word "bug report").
Could you imagine the introduction of some "muddy tracking numbers"?  ;-)"

First, you really mean transition from NYU to ACT, not GNAT to ACT, since
we are talking about GNAT in either case.

At NYU, we were being funded by the US DoD to develop GNAT and provide
general support for GNAT. That funding ended in July of 1995, at which
time ACT took on the support. We no longer have specific funding for
providing support for the general user community. As I have noted before
we do accept bug reports from anyone and eventually look at them, but
we minimize the effort that is required for processing these reports,
and in particular, we do not assign tracking numbers to those who
submit them, or enter into discussions about their status [except
in specific cases where it seems useful to us to do so].

Sure I realize you would prefer that we do the extra work to assign
these tracking numbers (and indeed that we provide free support for
everyone :-) However, I am afraid the US government funded free lunch
is over here. We certainly appreciate the fact that the DoD was willing
to launch this project, but we also agree that it is perfectly reasonable
for them not to fund it in this general manner indefinitely, and that it
makes better sense all round for those who need GNAT support to be the
ones who pay for it.

We will do our best to maintain general availability of lastest versions
of GNAT, both in binary and source form (note that that there is nothing
in the GPL, or in the way GNAT is set up that requires us to make these
versions available, it is something we choose to do as part of our effort
to encourage widespread use of Ada). We will also continue to accept
bug reports from everyone, and eventually to fix all the bugs that are
reported, but that's the extent of the free support that is available
at the current time from Ada Core Technologies.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies