Aura – The Ada User Repository Annex

• alire

  29 255 9.3 Ada

  Command-line tool from the Alire project and supporting library

  

>It turns out, as is often the case, we weren’t the only ones getting this idea. And sometime shortly after we began working on AURA, another Ada package manager ALIRE appeared.

I remember hearing about ALIRE for the first time in 2018, and it seems to have been created a year before that: https://github.com/alire-project/alire/commit/eee18e0eeae46c... .

>We quite strongly disagree with the approach ALIRE takes. We feel it is too "me-too", and not Ada-specific enough, borrowing too heavily from Rust's cargo. It doesn't, to us, feel like a truly Ada-native solution. Tangentially, the use of the word "crates" for the unit of management does little to evoke the kind of principled self-confidence Ada normally exudes.

This feels like NIH syndrome to me. Cargo is amazing from a dev ergonomics perspective and stealing what it did right and improving on what it did wrong feels like the best approach to me.

>Looking at most popular language package managers out there, such as npm, pip, cargo, and even ALIRE, we see a common strategy of enforcing a versioning scheme via the package manager itself, and by extension, some mechanism for specifying inter-dependency version requirements. In theory this allows for any given package or project to clearly state the (minimum) required version of packages that it depends on. In practice, this means such a package manager enforced versioning scheme dooms both package authors and end users to certain conflict at some point. Anyone familiar with Node will know this pain. [...]

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