This seems useful. One thing Ada has been lacking is a central place to upload and use dependencies.<p>However, I’ve found that pure Ada code without a package manager is pretty easy to integrate using the gprbuild tool; you just copy the dependency’s .ads and .adb files into your project and add their enclosing folder to the list of source directories. gprbuild figures our how to build them pretty much automatically.<p>So I wish that instead of using TOML files, the dependencies would be specified in the gprbuild project files themselves. The syntax/options of GPR files would probably have to be extended, but it would be nice to have only one layer of config files that contains everything needed to build an Ada library/project.
> There is also a network graph view of the Alire ecosystem: <a href="https://alire.ada.dev/network" rel="nofollow">https://alire.ada.dev/network</a><p>Nice! Is there something similar for other languages?
All I hope is that they'll think about corporate firewalls and provide a simple way to mirror the whole thing (including their gnat-subscriber-only & tools&libs versions). Or at least provide some kind of Web page with all the download links for the transitive dependencies for a package...<p>PYPI kills me everytime I need to run any ML stuff, and I wish there was a systematic page to d/l all transitive dependencies (at least from requirements files and maybe setup.py static interpretation...)
This is a great thing for the Ada community. I hope this encourages more contribution and collaboration on libraries that keep Ada useful for mainstream development.
It appears they may need more metadata about packages.<p>The example "Finding an Ada PDF library" is <a href="https://alire.ada.dev/search/?q=pdf" rel="nofollow">https://alire.ada.dev/search/?q=pdf</a>. That leads to <a href="https://alire.ada.dev/crates/apdf.html" rel="nofollow">https://alire.ada.dev/crates/apdf.html</a>, with<p><pre><code> Apdf
Standalone, portable package for producing dynamically PDF documents
Author: Gautier de Montmollin
Maintainer: fabien.chouteau@gmail.com
License: MIT
Version: 5.0.0
Dependencies: No dependency.
Tags: No tags.
Badge: [Copy image location: https://img.shields.io/endpoint?url=https://alire.ada.dev/badges/apdf.json]
</code></pre>
Searching for Apdf points to <a href="http://www.a-pdf.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.a-pdf.com/</a>, which doesn't look like it's Ada-ish. Is Apdf <a href="https://apdf.sourceforge.io/" rel="nofollow">https://apdf.sourceforge.io/</a>? [Ah, yes it is.]
Congratulations to all involved, this looks like a great addition to the Ada ecosystem.<p>I like the use of tags to clarify which projects are in SPARK.<p>I realise it's in beta, but, some feedback: on the linked <i>Crates</i> page, there doesn't seem to be a way to browse the source of the projects. I was expecting to be able to click a link and be taken to something akin to a GitHub page, but this doesn't seem to be possible. Some of the crates link to project home pages.<p>Also, it would be neat if the <i>Network graph</i> page showed which projects were in SPARK, perhaps by using colour.
'Bout time! A lack of 3rd party libraries is a sticking point for a lot of Ada projects I'd like to do. The first party libraries are great though.