Re: GCC 3.1 released

[Jerry van Dijk <jvandyk@attglobal.net>]

dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar) writes:

> But none of these releases failed ACATS tests and tests in
> our test suite. GNAT 5 has significant numbers of failures
> in all categories on all targets.

<snip>

> Our new approach for public releases, integration into the
> GCC 3 tree, does not give any such guarantees. The plus is
> that it is far closer to our development wavefront, the minus is that
> it is likely to be somewhat unstable.

Just for clarification: DOes the GCC 3.1 release mean there will be no more
public releases from ACT ?

-> if so, that means I will have to set up the GCC 3.1 build tree and ACATS
   and start hunting bugs which may already have been solved by ACT, instead 
   of using my time more productively.

Also, some time ago the NT release was split in a Standard GNAT release and
a Windows support package. Does the new policy mean that there will be no
more Windows support package releases from ACT ?

-> the latter means we as users will have to set up a separate project to
   maintain and develop this further, as otherwise GNAT becomes unusable for
   us.

Finally, the Mingw32 (which includes GNAT) packaging is not very helpful for 
beginners, esp. not Ada beginners. It seems that with a lack of further public 
windows releases from ACT, another project is needed to prepare a beginner 
usable install package.

All in all, if there are no more public releases for NT from ACT, we windows
users need to organize ourself, to make sure that GNAT remains an alternative
to ObjectAda on Windows. GNAT 3.14p is nice, but already obsolete both in
GNAT version and being based on GCC 2.8.1.

-- 
--  Jerry van Dijk   | email: jvandyk@attglobal.net
--  Leiden, Holland  | web:   users.ncrvnet.nl/gmvdijk