Re: GNAT GPL 2005 Edition is now available - A Vote and some other comments

[Jeff Creem <jcreem@yahoo.com>]

Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> "Ludovic Brenta" <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org> writes:
> 
>>OK, here are the votes so far.
> 
> 
> With the large number of responses, here is an update:
> 
> Voter                gnat-gpl  gnat-3.4  gnat-4.0  gnat-3.4+patches
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> Adrian Wrigley          -1              
> Andreas Schwartz        -1              
> Brian May                1                  1
> Chris Danx              -1                  1
> Jacob Sparre Andersen   -1        1         2
> Jeffrey Carter          -1          
> Marc A. Criley          -1        1         2
> Niklas Holsti           -1
> Samuel Tardieu          -1        1         2
> Simon Clubley           -1        1         2
> Stéphane Rivière        -1        1         2
>                         
> TOTALS:                 -9        5        12             0
> 
> As before, please feel free to add to this matrix or amend your vote
> as necessary.  In the mean time, this looks like a landslide, I hope
> AdaCore is listening :)
> 

I vote against gnat-gpl. Any other the others seem fine and may be based 
on what sort of a quality product can be built.

Note I don't really have that big of a problem with the AdaCore 
approach. It limits the applicability of their free distribution but we 
all seem to crave an AdaCore blessed release which implies we feel they 
add value. They want to encourage people that can pay for support to pay 
for support. People generally are happy with the FSF version of GCC for 
their C,C++ work and don't complain that Wind River charges for their 
blessed version (and offers no free GPL only version or any other 
version for public download).

The biggest problems with the FSF tree are:

1) Ada quality is not considered as part of the release criterea.
2) Only real activity is in head (mostly because the majority of the 
activity is from AdaCore)
3) Lack of (or at least difficult to configure) some of the supporting 
tools such as ASIS.


To answer the other question that went along with this poll.

I currently use WindowsXP with mingw, recently added the gnat-gpl-2005 
from adacore for testing purposes, also use CentOS 4 for my 2 Linux 
boxes with the distributions version of gcc/ada.

As for debian. Many years ago I used debian. I was relatively happy with 
it. At some point when moving to new hardware I looked around again and 
went redhat 7 then redhat 9 on the following upgrade based upon what 
seemed like some more recent libaries for Gtk/GNOME. After a short stint 
at fedora core 1 I settled on CentOS given that many of the bigger 
companies only claim redhat enterprise support (this making Redhat based 
distributions the preferred version at work). So, the logical choice at 
home was then Centos.