alire-index VS Ravenports

Submitted libtcl and libtk externals to Alire’s 1.2.1 index - all problems fixed, I hope.

I do not know the exact rationale of the Alire devs, but Ada already uses (since 83) the word "package" to indicate a module or namespace, so calling dependencies a "crate" seems to avoid confusion with an Ada "package".

The crates of the community index [1] are somewhat vetted because they are added to the index using a PR on GitHub. You're not required to use these external crates though, you can create your own monorepo if you want.

My personal experience has been that a package manager (for any language) makes it much easier to download and build some project.

[1] https://github.com/alire-project/alire-index

Yes you can specify dependency on external libraries that will be provided by the distribution (or msys2 on WIndows). We already have a few of those in the index, for instance you can take a look at SDL2: https://github.com/alire-project/alire-index/blob/stable-1.0/index/li/libsdl2/libsdl2-external.toml

The packaging system is a fork from FreeBSD pkg(8), so it has probably the same capabilities. My installation seems to use HTTP transport through www.ravenports.com, but it has been available from my machines (in France) whenever I tried, including ~5 minutes ago.

But you're correct: John Marino who conceived DragonFly's dports moved on handed over maintenance to a few volunteers who are unable to keep things up to date. He created a new ports project called Ravenports which was meant to succeed dports on DragonFly, but since the ports count is much lower, this has not happened, yet. It has better tooling and automation features, but also unique challenges due to being cross-platform (supporting DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD as well as Solaris and Linux for package creation). If anybody is interested in that, feel free to ask questions. I contribute to that project (I'm not a dfly user, though).