Re: Root of a GNAT problem (was: Gnat v3.05 bug or compilation problem

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

Peter Herman said

Your inquiry above will lead to a repost by Robert Dewar, in which he will
explain that you should have reported this to report@gnat.com.
Of course you are not a paying customer and therefore your report
will be of lowest priority and possibly never considered.

  On the contrary, all reports will be considered, and many such reports
  in the past have been corrected.

In the past, a very large world-wide community of volunteers sent their
bug reports which were neatly classified and the status of the bug
could be traced. Times have changed due to lack of sponsoring.
But unfortunately, the mechanism too, which I personally consider
a great disadvantage for all of us volunteers and especially for ACT.

  I see that non-paying customers would like to get free support of this
  kind, and would consider it an advantage, but tracking bugs externally
  and corresponding on their status is time consuming, and is a service
  we provide only for our customers.

The important point is the traceability of a bug inquiry.
If this is no more given, then the number of volunteer reports,
which IS a kind of energy/money too, will go dramatically down.

In the past, I gave several dozens of bug reports although
this has never been publicly recognized in e.g. a list of contributors.
Nevertheless I am satisfied with the feeling to have contributed to
the maturing of a good product GNAT.

  And I am pleased to say that we have many volunteers who continue to
  send us useful bug reports, no doubt on a similar basis of satisfaction
  to help contribute.


Today: Why should I send a bug report?:

  -- Will they care?

        Absolutely, all bug reports get looked at and if there is a bug,
        fixed in a future version. We are pleased to receive such
        reports. They may have low priority, but they will get looked at.

  -- Did they receive it?

        You should get a response acknowledging the receipt of the report.
        If you do not, you should assume we did not receive it. This response
        may sometimes take a few days to appear.

  -- Did they classify my bug?

        Yes, eventually all reported bugs get filed, classified and
        examined (e.g. if they are a simple misunderstanding, then
        we discard them, but if they show a real bug, we file them).

  -- Is my problem already known there?
  -- Is it fixed in Version 3.07?

        It would take us time that is not directly helpful to us. These are
        the kind of services, along with figuring out work arounds and
        user problems in Ada and the use of GNAT, that we provide on a
        supported basis.

Our primary priority is support for paying customers. Our secondary priority
is continuing development and improvement of the system. As part of this
continuing development, we certainly spend time looking at bug reports from
non-supported users, but this is definitely not a priority activity, and we
work to minimize the amount of effort required for such activities.