[Savannah-hackers] savannah.gnu.org: submission of Grace

[dennison]

A package was submitted to savannah.gnu.org.
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Ted Dennison <address@hidden> described the package as follows:
License: other
Other License: For this effort to succeed, it will ultimately need to be a 
facility that all vendors will feel compelled to ship with their Ada compilers. 
Unfourtunately, using the GPL would actively work against that goal. Thus the 
general consensus has been to make the specifications (Ada\'s equivalent of 
C\'s .h files) public domain. Any implementations (eg: Ada\'s equivalent of 
C\'s .c files) we develop will be \"reference implementations\", and will be 
released under the same license used for the GNU Ada compiler (the fourth 
license listed at 
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#TOCGPLCompatibleLicenses ), which 
is commonly known in the Ada community as the GMGPL. Vendors who do not wish to 
abide by that license will still be free to develop their own implementations 
of the PD specs, but of course will have to do all the development and testing 
work themselves. I suspect most will just use the GMGPL implementation. 

Documentation has not been discussed yet, but the most sensible scheme would be 
to license \"reference\" materials as Public Domain, so that they can be 
distributed wherever the PD specs are distributed. \"user guides\" would be 
released using a free documentation license (most likely the GNU Free Document 
License, but that has yet to be decided).
Package: Grace
System name: grace
This package does NOT want to apply for inclusion in the GNU project

Grace is intended to be a devolopment project for the next level of standard 
Ada libraries. Ada is generally considered a superior software development 
language, but many feel they still can\'t use it for serious work due to its 
compartively weak support library (compared to C++\'s STL and MFC, and Java\'s 
assorted libraries for example). Ada has some good stuff in its standard 
library, there just isn\'t enough of it. It needs to be dramaticly extended, 
but there isn\'t a big company in the Ada community (like AT&T and Microsoft 
for C++ or Sun for Java) to lead the effort. So we feel the Ada user community 
itself must step up and fill the void, to create a more complete Ada standard 
library.

The first goal is a software component library. We intend to take on other 
subprojects as well, but growth in the amount of subprojects must be managed 
well. We do not want to take on too much at once. There is great interest in 
the Ada community in this project, but our community is relatively small, so a 
rapid dispersion of focus could be fatal to the whole effort. Discussions and 
organization has mostly been carried out in comp.lang.ada. The current focus is 
on producing a standard list component. That has been accomplished, and now we 
need a place to host the results and to help facilitate our further efforts in 
a more organized fashion.

This project has been going on for about 4 moths now. I\'d say I\'ve seen at 
least 15 different people participating, including 3 submitting code. There is 
no real homepage yet. Most discussions so far have occured on the comp.lang.ada 
newsgroup.