esp32c3-ada VS alire-index

I'm currently aiming to put esp32c3-ada and esp32c3-ada-bindings in a state where others can use these as an easy starting point for their ESP projects. I thereby also recognize that I don't have the time to go the full path to a productive application. So instead I try to bundle the efforts that other people might put in this SoC together so that everyone can benefit from that.

I recently published gpr-rust which allows an easier use of Ada libraries in Rust. And I'll continue working on my ESP32C3-Ada port.

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