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

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

Larry says

If we agree that ACT gives priority to support customers, presumably
that includes not only defects reported by those customers but also
defects those customers are likely to encounter in the future.  It
may be that the defect reported by the original poster is judged as
quite likely to be hit by others, which presumably will escalate the
priority.

   Indeed, we assign priorites based on the perceived seriousness of the
   bug, and it is true that sometimes unsupported users report bugs that
   we give highish priority to (never as high as bugs from supported
   users, but high enough to get looked at more rapidly).

So what can ACT vary to provide "added value" and encourage support
contracts ?  Certainly feedback on bug status is one item (I have
no idea whether they have more feedback for paying customers).

   Exactly, for supported customers, who identify their reports to us
   by using their customer number, we provide immediate responses, and
   high priority fixing of bugs. Most of the time "bug status" is not
   an issue, since we work hard to fix customer bugs very rapidly, but
   for less urgent bugs, absolutely, we provide whatever feedback is
   required.

   In practice, only a fraction of bug reports from both supported and
   non-supported users are actual GNAT bugs. The rest of the time they
   come from a misunderstanding of Ada 95, or of GNAT, or simply from
   program bugs. For supported customers, we help them sort through
   these category of problems as well.

   It is not a matter so much of encouraging support contracts. It is more
   a matter of providing services that some find useful that is commensurate
   with the resources involved. Our customers find this support worthwhile.
   I quite understand that non-paying customers would like the same level
   of support, or perhaps some support at a lower level, but we cannot
   manufacturer resources for such free support. We do spend the time to
   continue to make public releases available, and we do accept bug reports
   from unsupported users, but that is the extent of the resources we can
   spend for unsupported users.

A somewhat softer response, which I gather ACT does not offer to
non-customers is "we understand the cause and hope to include a fix
in Version X".

   I don't know where you gather false information like this :-)
   Here is the usual response to reports from non-supported users:

     Thank you for submitting this GNAT bug report to Ada Core Technologies.
     We will investigate this when we have time and if indeed there is a bug
     in GNAT, a fix will be available in a future release of GNAT. Please note
     that we are unable to guarantee any specific response to bug reports from
     unsupported users of GNAT or to provide information on the tracking of
     these bugs, but we will eventually examine all reports.
     
     If you need rapid and/or guaranteed response to problems, please contact
     our support department by sending email to support@gnat.com. Supported
     customers can receive guaranteed timely response to problems, and also
     prereleases of new versions of the system. We are also able to answer
     general questions on the use of Ada and GNAT for supported customers.
     
     We are not able to provide help or answer questions for unsupported
     users of GNAT, but we suggest that you join our informal mailing list,
     chat@gnat.com by sending mail to chat-request@gnat.com with subject
     line "subscribe xxx", where xxx is your email address. This mailing
     list allows users of GNAT to informally discuss problems, and may be
     a source of help for you.

   The one thing that is missing is the X, but there is a good reason for
   this, in our experience, even unsupported users would regard this as a
   commitment, and yell at us for not meeting it. We are very careful not
   to make commitments that we cannot meet, and indeed we only make
   commitments with a definite date to our customers!

One courtesy ACT could provide to all would be an automated mail
message saying "Internet Mail worked, and we received your bug
report entitled 'Please change method syntax to be more like C++'".

   The above message is NOT an automated mail message. I send it out manually
   as I process the bug report. I don't like the use of automated messages
   for this purpose. This takes a little more work, but it means that when
   you get the above response, you know that the message really was received.

That mail message could include an ACT serial number, I suppose,
but then someone will complain that their syntax change request
never got included in a subsequent version and nobody at ACT has
chosen to engage them in a lengthy discourse regarding the obvious
superiority of the C++-style syntax !

   We do supply the ACT bug tracking number to customers, and we are quite
   happy to discuss all suggestions with our customers, although our
   commitment to serving our customers needs does not extend to adding
   "superior" C++ syntax to the language :-)