Re: Adaforge?

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

mockturtle wrote on comp.lang.ada:
> I was wondering if it could be worth to try to collect all
> this stuff in a centralized place, kind of "rubyforge" for
> Ruby

Yes, but it is impractical given the present state of affairs
and there are better ways to spend your precious time.

After reading this thread with great interest I have come to
the following conclusions:

* there is no need for a new web site.  Instead, it is better
  to contribute meaningful content to the the existing AdaIC
  and Ada Programming Wikibook sites.  (The latter already has
  several pages full of links to libraries).

* We don't need another forge.  Existing Ada-centric forges
  already include http://forge.ada-ru.org,
  http://www.ada-france.org:8081, http://codelabs.ch and
  http://scm.ada.cx.  General-purpose forges containing Ada
  sources include Tigris, Berlios, SourceForge.  I probably
  forgot some.  Dmitry, Stephe and a few other individuals host
  their sources on their private web sites.  I think it is better
  to improve the existing forges than to create a new one.

* Each of the aforementioned Ada-centric forges relies on one
  or two dedicated, enthusiastic, skilled volunteers for
  maintenance.  This is bad.  A good idea, for someone skilled
  and interested in forges, is to join one of them as an
  administrator.

* Instead of asking all developers to migrate to the same forge,
  it might be a better idea to ask them to add a link to their
  projects in the Ada wikibook (section 2.6, "Other language
  libraries").  Thus the existing wikibook can serve as the
  central place where people can discover tools and libraries.

* As Dmitry well pointed out, there is a difference between
  hosting sources and hosting binaries.  My stance on this
  matter is probably well-known on this newsgroup.  In short,
  binaries belong in the general-purpose repositories of their
  target platforms; only this can give these binaries the
  visibility they deserve. IOW, the packages should be in the
  official Debian/Fedora/FreeBSD/Cygwin/Slackware/whatever
  repository if one exists.  Windows lacks such a repository, so
  for Windows the fallback is to publish the binaries alongside
  the sources.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.
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