Re: JAVA and ADA JGNAT

[aidan@skinner.demon.co.uk (Aidan Skinner)]

On Tue, 25 Jan 2000 23:06:06 GMT, Robert Dewar
<robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote: 

>and often closely held for a long time. The same is true
>of course for Linux developments at Redhat. The difference

I've heard this a lot, and I've never been *entirely* convinced about
it, especially given that redhat make their in-development
distribution available via ftp... 

Of course, there's no way to be sure (without working for Redhat), but
I've yet to see any evidence that suppourts this.

Abscence of evidence is not evidence of abscence after all.

>development. In the case of JGNAT, the appropriate stage
>for the last couple of months has been to have a selected
>small number of beta testers kicking the tires.

OTOH there isn't anything inherently wrong with the cathedral
development model, and it's necessary in a lot of cases (eg. it is,
IMO, entirely justified in XFree86)

>of many open source or free software development projects that
>work that way, with the possible exception of GNOME (and a
>number of small scale projects). I definitely think that would

The Linux kernel is close to this, in that releases of the
development tree are fairly frequent.

>in progress that were non-functional would not in our judgment
>be helpful to the general Ada community, and that is our
>primary constituency as far as the public release goes.

In this case I would tend to think that this is the right approach,
simply because of the complexity of GNAT and the fact that it's a
relatively monolithic application.

I think that the structure of something is more important than it's
size, GNOME benefits from a bazaar model because it's a collection of
things which occasionally interoperate and don't depend on each other
and there's a clear distinction between gnome-core, gnome-libs
etc. and the various parts of gnome-libs aren't interdependent.

- Aidan
-- 
Little Willy was a chemist, Little Willy is no more,
What he thought was H2O, Was H2SO4.
http://www.skinner.demon.co.uk/aidan/