Re: Contributing patches to GPL Ada projects (was: Is Ada dead?)

[Emmanuel Briot <briot@gnat.com>]

Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam (Larry Kilgallen) writes:
> I think one factor is likely to be the great divide between "supported"
> customers of ACT (who get GNAT quickly, in binary for their platform)
> and everyone else.  The "everyone else" are those most in a position
> to contribute patches.
> 
> It doesn't much matter if the rules are the same for those projects
> as for GNAT, the perception is that ACT can fund all improvements
> with revenues from the supported customers.



No, this argument is incorrect for the projects I was speaking about (GtkAda,
GVD, Xml/Ada).

At least for the first two, the CVS tree is accessible to everyone read-only
(provided of course they recompile their own version, we do not distribute
daily binaries). It isn't the case yet for the third one, but then it is in a
very early stage of development.

I was also speaking of the ada-mode for Emacs. I am happy to report that I do
get some patches for it (almost always from the same 3 or 4 persons, though).

So everyone should be able to contribute, and see their patches integrated (or
reviewed) into the CVS tree fast enough.

I also agree that supported customers are not expected to send patches (they
have their own projects to work on :-), and after all that's why they are
paying a support contract.

But other users certainly have their own needs, and cannot expect us to do the
enhancements very fast (we simply don't have the time). That's when sending
patches make sense. Instead of having to patch their own private version after
every release of GVD, once their code is integrated into the official sources
they do not need to maintain it anymore for each release. Thus, it saves time
for them, and improves the product for everybody else in the world. Sounds like
a win-win deal...

And this is definitely the way other free-software projects work, even when
there are companies behing them (Gnome/Simian, Linux/Redhat/Suze,.... ).

ACT does fund some internal developments on the revenues from supported
customers (after all, that's where GVD started, as well as several other
tools). We also add enhancements requested by these supported customers.

But if a non-supported user has needs, the best way to see them integrated is
to try and submit patches :-)

Emmanuel