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=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Simon Wright Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Studying and Maintaining GNAT, Is There Any Interest in a New Group? Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2018 11:09:08 +0100 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Message-ID: References: <309225242.556906218.575482.laguest-archeia.com@nntp.aioe.org> <8736v2f34p.fsf@nightsong.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Injection-Info: reader02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="970863088b3517653e695519671ec46b"; logging-data="32343"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1834NGTfukbuRrj1RMn6CmwoYzGvZLYoeQ=" User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/25.3 (darwin) Cancel-Lock: sha1:bgtOqrjg+Nc7St+m4uieTLb0vTM= sha1:ErZlRRa6l7zk4FPTOkuUV73JJLg= Xref: reader02.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:54260 Date: 2018-08-26T11:09:08+01:00 List-Id: Paul Rubin writes: > Simon Wright writes: >> I'm far from expert on GCC procedures, but all three of the Ada >> front-end maintainers (see [1]) are AdaCore employees, and I don't >> think you're going to get approval for updates to Ada internals from >> anyone else. > > Unless you've got some particular reason to believe that (e.g. based > on experience submitting patches), I tend to be skeptical. Most FOSS > projects love getting good patches (patches that work, are tested, > conform to the project's standards and interfaces, etc.) What they > don't like is "homework assignments", i.e. someone else coming along > and telling them to do some work (unless they are a paying customer of > course). > > I haven't been involved with GNAT at all, but I've contributed to GCC > and have found the maintainers to generally be receptive to patches > where the submitter is the one who does the work, and they're at least > somewhat willing to advise about what work is needed. What they don't > want is "please implement feature X" or even "here is my crappy patch, > please clean it up, test it, rework it so it fits the rest of the > codebase, etc., all for free". That's what support contracts are for. > > When it's a clean patch that really improves things and includes all > necessary documentation and tests, it is usually smooth sailing. A patch that fixes a bootstrap-preventing ICE on Darwin is (a) likely not to be in the Ada internals even if it's in the Ada directories, (b) equally likely to be discussed/accepted by Darwin maintainers as by Ada maintainers. A small patch that fixed a wide character encoding problem was approved but the identical patch actually applied (some time later) was originated by an AdaCore employee. (I was miffed about this, you can tell) A patch that fixed an ICE was rejected because AdaCore had a better fix in mind for their own source tree (I can see there may well be fork-related issues here). Aside from the hairy nature of the compiler internals, this is my main reason for not trying to add features to the compiler: AdaCore have a development plan that we aren't party to, and almost any change could be affected. Also, I have quite enough to interest me anyway!