Re: How to challenge a GCC patch?

["J-P. Rosen" <rosen@adalog.fr>]

Le 28/09/2021 à 09:38, Arnaud Charlet a écrit :
> We have removed ASIS support first in our own trunk of GNAT, and then
> 6 months later we have removed it from the GCC FSF trunk, so talking
> about lack of fairness is, well, unfair.It is unfair because asis-gcc is not distributed to the community

> Why? Because ASIS is no longer maintained as an internal standard and
> hasn't evolved beyond Ada 95 because there was not enough support in
> the community and among vendors,
The ASIS standard has not been updated, but AdaCore did a great job of 
evolving its ASIS implementation to support all new features up to 
Ada2012. It would be easy to add these improvements to a revised ASIS 
standard, and a New Work Item will be proposed to ISO to that effect.

Anyway, this issue of ASIS not being an up-to-date standard is a red 
herring, since LibAdalang is NOT a standard, and presumably never will.

> so we've ended up maintaining it on our own for many years, which 
> lately has become too large a burden.This is plain wrong. You don't maintain ASIS "on your own", there are 
customers who pay a support contract for ASIS.

> In addition, maintaining ASIS tree generation in GNAT has been also a
> challenge and a resource drain because each time we make a change in
> the GNAT front-end, this may break ASIS and we may have to make
> difficult investigation and changes and sometimes almost impossible
> changes because there are conflicts between the need of a code
> generator (GNAT for GCC or LLVM) and the need of an Ada analysis
> library (ASIS).
> 
> So we've decided to address this burden by moving tree generation for
> ASIS in a separate branch, so that this maintenance burden on GCC
> trunk would disappear.
We are talking about FSF-GNAT here. AFAIK, asis-gcc has not been pushed 
to FSF-GNAT.

> This has been done both in AdaCore's tree where ASIS now resides on a
> separate branch, and in GCC FSF where the tree generation is
> available in GCC 10.x and works well here, and is available for the
> community to contribute and maintain for as long as needed.
> 
But this means that users of ASIS will be stuck to GCC 10.x, or will 
have to handle two versions of gcc at the same time, which is an endless 
source of burden. Why don't you make asis-gcc available to the 
community? It doesn't require any extra cost, since it is available to 
paying customers!

Anyway, my question was about how to challenge a patch. I estimate that 
this patch is unfortunate, you argue that it is necessary. Let the GCC 
governance decide; AdaCore doesn't rule GCC.

-- 
J-P. Rosen
Adalog
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Tel: +33 1 45 29 21 52
https://www.adalog.fr