Re: Gnat GPS to be released to the public?

[Stephen Leake <Stephen.A.Leake@nasa.gov>]

"Marin David Condic" <mcondic.auntie.spam@acm.org> writes:

> Stephen Leake <Stephen.A.Leake@nasa.gov> wrote in message
> news:ubrzy19cz.fsf@nasa.gov...
> >
> > ACT does not make public statements about future release schedules.
> > Basically, they acknowledge that it is impossible to reliably answer
> > the question "How long will it take you to find that bug?" :).
> >
> 
> But.... but.... but.... Isn't it written in Ada?!?!?! There shouldn't BE any
> bugs if its written in Ada?!?!?! :-)

:).

> Realistically, if they wanted to release things on a schedule, they
> could. Once you have a baseline product that basically works, 

GPS is not there yet. I don't use it daily, because it has too many
bugs that get in the way.

It also doesn't have enough features to compete with Emacs yet; that's
a closely related issue.

> you could aim for quarterly releases and you just get the snapshot
> of whatever changes have been closed out to that point in time. You
> pick your date of release and count backwards the time you need to
> run some sort of regression tests, write up some documentation,
> etc., then take a snapshot of your software at that point and
> release it.

I believe ACT decides on a feature set as the release trigger, rather
than a date. But as I said earlier, I really don't know.

> I suspect that the reasoning has more to do with marketing strategy and
> monetary concerns than it does with bug fixes and stability.

ACT's marketing strategy works for me: I send them money every year,
instead of some other Ada company :).

-- 
-- Stephe