Re: Adaforge?

[Manuel Gomez <mgrojo@gmail.com>]

On Wednesday, May 2, 2012 12:12:20 PM UTC+2, Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> * 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.

You have surely forgotten GitHub [1].

I try to maintain updated a list of forges and library directories in the Ada wikibook [2]. I have added the Ada-centric forges and Berlios, which sadly only contain three projects. Unfortunately Tigris lacks a way to find Ada projects so I have not added it.

> 
> * 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.

Apart from the Ada Programming Wikibook there is also the Ada Commons wiki [3] which also contains links to several Ada libraries. I think the library directory should be merged into one of the two in order to avoid redundancy. Wikibooks has the advantage of the Wikimedia foundation support and Commons the advantage of a wiki used exclusively for Ada: for example, the article names are flat and simpler. My opinion is that the directory should be merged into Ada Commons and the Ada wikibook should host only the pedagogical content.

A good idea for a project would be to implement a bot for extracting information from other directories or forges in order to populate this unified Ada directory.

Another alternative is to maintain all the Ada projects referenced in oloh [4], since you can search by implementation language there, and has many interesting tools such as the source code analysis.

As you can see there are already enough sites, what we should do is unite efforts, expand the content of current sites and possibly federate contents just like Planet Ada does for blog like entries.

[1] https://github.com/languages/Ada
[2] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Portals
[3] http://commons.ada.cx
[4] http://www.ohloh.net/p?page=3&q=language%3Aada&sort=relevance