Re: Adaforge?

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>]

mockturtle <framefritti@gmail.com> writes:

> Recently, a post on the LinkedIn group "Ada Programming Language,"
> made me think that an ingredient that can help the spreading of a
> programming language is a variety of libraries. I confess :-) that
> sometimes I use Ruby and in the past I worked also in PERL (but only
> with version 4! :-) and I found it very convenient to have access to
> many libraries (of variegate quality, to be honest) ready to use.

Debian is one candidate for that; it enforces compatibility among the
packages and compiler, making installation simpler. It already has all
the rest of the infrastructure (mailing lists, web sites, etc); possibly
not as user-friendly as some others.

Failing that, the ada-france monotone repository is a good place for
collecting lots of packages (monotone is _great_ CM system!). It doesn't
have a user-friendly website, though.

For a website, I suggest using the Indefero tools
(http://www.indefero.net/); the monotone project uses them
(https://code.monotone.ca/ but you can't see much without a login).

> I understand that some of us write their own libraries (I see every
> now and then announcements on this group), so I was wondering if it
> could be worth to try to collect all this stuff in a centralized
> place, kind of "rubyforge" for Ruby. I have a faint memory of a
> "adaforge.com," but it seems that the domain has no owner currently. I
> also have an half a memory of some half-sleeping Ada software
> repositories, but I could be wrong.

As usual, what is lacking is someone with time and energy to actually
maintain the site.

It's probably easier to become a Debian Maintainer than to maintain an
entire website (I've done a little bit of both), so you should consider
doing that, and offer to package other people's projects for Debian.

On the other hand, if your skills lie more in the web domain than the
Ada coding domain, maybe a web site would be easier. Have at it!

-- 
-- Stephe