Re: Development process in the Ada community

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

Michael Erdmann wrote in message <3CB5D550.4000201@snafu.de>...
>But is there any move in the Ada communitiy to standarize something in
the GUI domain?
>Assume somebody would dare to try it, how could she/he achieve this?

That was the original idea behind Claw (in th 1996/7 timeframe). The
idea was to create a de-facto standard, make a subset freely available,
and eventually put the binding into the public domain to be a standard.

However, it didn't work, because hardly anyone wanted to use it,
preferring to roll their own. So we have a large number of such
bindings.

That is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does prevent any of them
reaching a critical mass.

Ada seems to have divided into a formally standardized part, and a
completely informal part. But that's always been the case (look at all
of the X bindings that were made for Ada 83 in the 1980s), and probably
is part of the nature of things.

> You find the same behavior in the comp.lang.java groups,but
> at least they have something like the JCP, and not to forget
> SUN, to evelove (defacto) standards.
> From my perspective this is all missing in the Ada community.

I can imagine an "ACP" would be useful, but the question is, who is
going to pay for it? My experience as editor of the ARG is that getting
the paper-pushing done by volunteers is like herding cats. When the
budget allows, I often just do it myself. But writing standards is NOT
fun, so I'm not surprised that people don't do it. In any case, an "ACP"
would need someone to coordinate and enforce standards on the standards,
and that pretty much requires paid personel.

I'd like to be able to set up an internet process for secondary
standards (the subject has been discussed in WG9), but it obviously
would take an additional budget, and we're short on money (for work on
the Amendment - "Ada 0y") as it is.

                Randy.