Congratulations to all involved, this looks like a great addition to the Ada ecosystem. I like the use of tags to clarify which projects are in SPARK. I realise it's in beta, but, some feedback: on the linked Crates 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.…
Thanks for your feedback :) - there doesn't seem to be a way to browse the source of the projects. That's true, so far the contributors for crates have the option to provide a link to a website. This link can be to the repo, but it is not mandatory. - it would be neat if the Network graph page showed which projects were in SPARK Good idea :) Please open issues on the repo so we can keep track of your ideas: https://g…
First beta release of Alire, the package manager for Ada/SPARK
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Re: First beta release of Alire, the package manager for Ada/SPARK
#22This seems useful. One thing Ada has been lacking is a central place to upload and use dependencies. 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.…
> 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 are several problems with GPR. The first is that it's GNAT-only and no other compiler would recognize it. The second is more technical: GPR is more "stringly-typed" than it ought to be, and thus despite a somewhat Ada-like syntax it isn't nearly as nice as Ada-source.
I've been mulling the idea of leveraging Ada's generic-system for a method to use as a Project specification/definition -- if you could have an Ada generic as a project-file, then you could [re]use the compiler/syntax-checker... I've also sketched out a way that Generic-parameters could be used by a project-builder program, generating an appropriate menu.