Re: Ada package registry?

[Shark8 <onewingedshark@gmail.com>]

On Tuesday, February 2, 2016 at 3:51:23 PM UTC-7, Randy Brukardt wrote:
> "Shark8" <onewingedshark> wrote in message 
> >> ...
> >> BTW, this is *exactly* what I thought you meant. I find it a combination 
> >> of
> >> overkill and likely harm to the Ada community (by excluding large 
> >> portions
> >> of, by the extra work involved at a minimum).
> 
> >I see your point, but I don't agree that it's likely to harm the Ada 
> >community. (Provided that it's done competently.)
> 
> Harm from two things:
> (1) Working only with a limited number of Ada implementations (most likely 
> one);
> (2) Only having a limited subset of code available;
> 
> Both of these could be fixed, but it would be very difficult to do.

The second can be ameliorated by the aforementioned "packaging tool", I think, and the first needn't be a problem at all: we don't need to tie ourselves to a particular Ada-implementation or build-system and could easily consider those to be outside the scope of such a project.

> >> I am not interested into moving to on-line systems that would require
> >> significant work (to save nearly 30 years of development history), to 
> >> lose
> >> important capabilities, and to have less security. Change for the sake of
> >> change (and that's what most of it is) is actively harmful to everyone, 
> >> and
> >> a massive waste of time.
> >
> >I understand and agree -- however, if the system you're using is 30 years 
> >old
> > and contains facilities that modern VCSs lack, doesn't this mean that 
> > there's an opportunity here?
> 
> Surely. The system we have works quite well for our needs, but I suspect it 
> would be too inflexible for others. The layout needs to be more akin to a 
> network or even relational system than the hierarchical approach I took. The 
> hierarchical approach is easy to understand, but the one way dependencies 
> can be overly limiting. I never figured out a good way to generalize it, 
> thus I've never pursued it further. Besides, VCSes seem to be nearly a 
> religious experience (similar to the way many programmers feel about their 
> editors), and I wasn't sure I wanted to wade into that (having done 
> something similar with Ada when I was younger).

Hm, I would be most interested in hearing how it handles things. -- Also, I have a Google-document (world editable) that currently contains my incomplete thoughts/ideas: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzyjMtQJe7iWTTBsS2o4TXBvWFU/view?usp=sharing -- So you're more than welcome to edit or comment.