Re: Some important packages have been orphaned
On Fri, Jul 26, 2002 at 06:19:35PM +1000, Brian May wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 26, 2002 at 09:41:24AM +0200, Jérôme Marant wrote:
> > GNAT is maintained by ACT, and this company gives a priority to its
> > customers so most of the bugs that were found in the public
> > release have probably already been fixed.
>
> Hmmmm. I am surprised that noone else has encountered the 2 bugs
> I have in gnat 3.14p.
>
> As for gnat 3.1, certain floating point operations are next to useless.
> I could work around this by using the libc functions for sin, cos, etc,
> but this seems a bit silly.
This would be ugly. These are bugs and they have to be fixed.
> (however, strangely enough, the actual source code is identical in both
> versions).
Do you mean the compiler code?
>
> > Now that the way of handling public releases has changed, I still
> > don't know how it is going to happen, i.e. what will be the
> > frequency of CVS commits for bugfixes. AFAIK, Laurent Guerby is
> > working on setting up ACATS tests. Many questions.
> >
> > They're preparing a patch for gdb in order to make gnat 3.1 programs
> > being debuggable with it.
>
> Good.
>
> Does this mean though that all work is now being concentrated on
> Gnat 3.1, and not the older 3.14p?
I think so. ACT is now concentrating on a gcc 3.1 version of
GNAT Pro and public releases are now in the gcc tree.
>
> (I am still a bit confused which version I should be trying to get
> fixed).
Well, gnat-3.1 has still not passed the ACATS tests. gnat 3.14p has.
But, I think that everything should be done to improve gnat-3.1
from now on. ACT said gnat-3.1 should be better than 3.14p.
>
> > > I have filed bugs reports both in Debian (gnat and gnat-3.1) and
> > > upstream (gnat-3.1), but so far no response from upstream. I did get
> > > a response from the Debian maintainers, but they can't be expected to
> > > solve upstream's problems.
> >
> > I think the gcc ML is now the place for reporting bugs, you already know
> > that.
>
> Actually I used the BTS system for reporting gcc bugs. See bugs 6910 and
> 6911 or Debian Bugs 147145 and 148529 (respectively). The gcc BTS bugs
> <URL:http://gcc.gnu.org/cgi-bin/gnatsweb.pl> are linked with the Debian
> BTS bug entries.
I've seen them all. I would expect ACT to speak up but what they plan
is still quite unclear. 3.1 is work in progress, I hope 3.2 will
be better.
Did you try to compile with the CVS version from HEAD?
> I haven't reported the bug specific to gnat 3.14p upstream though.
> Should I?
I think you should, yes.
>
> > Why not maintaining those packages in team, via CVS like the way it is
> > done currently with gcc and glibc.
> > In my opinion, this would increase quality of packages, avoiding them
> > to be unmaintained for some time.
>
> Sounds like a good idea.
Let's see if we can setup this in a reasonable timeframe.
Cheers,
--
Jérôme Marant
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