From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,978f50245fc02645 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: Root of a GNAT problem (was: Gnat v3.05 bug or compilation problem Date: 1996/12/09 Message-ID: X-Deja-AN: 203287508 references: <58h301$gad@alfali.enst-bretagne.fr> <58h6n2$2hbi@info4.rus.uni-stuttgart.de> <1996Dec9.110039.1@eisner> organization: New York University newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: 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 :-)