Re: Ada package registry?

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

<olivier.henley@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:dce00efe-1391-416e-9b2e-ec77e7b558ff@googlegroups.com...
>1. You can look at it the way you want, the end result of something like 
>code.dlang.org
> or haskell stack is more neat, efficient, structured, coherent and 
> appealing than the noisy
> search engine at AdaIC. (I entered the term physic ... OMG It was 
> disastrous. Nothing
> relevant. I even tried to find that search utility directly from google. 
> It was like a detective
> quest!) Arguing the opposite is, IMO, like arguing that the earth is flat.

Umm, "physic" isn't a word, I'm surprised you got any result at all. 
Probably only misspellings in old e-mail, surely couldn't be helpful.

I agree with you that Ada needs better publicity of the available tools and 
the like. The search engine would have gotten more mind-share if I could 
have come up with a snappy name for it -- but that's been beyond my 
capabilities. Since it doesn't have a snappy name, there's nothing to look 
for in Google. (And I'm not sure another search engine is the best place to 
look for our search engine anyway.)

Constructive suggestions are always welcome.

>2. You use way too much strong words like harmful and insult, to nuke a 
>PM/PR
> proposition. I get it that you are a tenor of the Ada community but it 
> does not qualify
> you to serve what I call 'toxic arguments'. IMHO, your statu quo and 
> orthodoxy
> deeply anchored in 'has been' technology poses much more of a drag to the 
> Ada
> pipelines than the envisioning of a PM for Ada; for future, open source, 
> pure Ada
> code projects.

My vision of Ada is of a language in which to construct code that is 
portable across implementations and across targets. To the extent that a 
tool, no matter how well-intentioned, interfers with that, then it is 
harmful to the future of Ada. GNAT /= Ada!! What I heard being discussed 
only seemed to make sense within the context of GNAT on Linux, because 
that's the only place where "package managers" make sense. Perhaps I 
over-reacted a bit; I don't think there is much benefit to such a system, 
but it wouldn't hurt so long as it is not tied to a particular 
implementation or target. In particular, the setup Tero described would not 
bother me (I'd still be worried about it providing an image of relatively 
inactive community by not having much in it, but that might be a risk worth 
taking if enough of you care).

>3. By not acting to attract people, you are constantly redirecting smart 
>young people
> to other communities, e.g Dlang. Many clever pals want to ditch C++ and 
> Ada
> would be a perfect fit to foster them. Wont happen with loud voices like 
> yours
> 'bullying' sensible propositions around.

Building complicated tools to do things that aren't really needed for Ada 
doesn't make it a "sensible proposition". If the "young people" need too 
much handholding, they're not really ready to engineer software with a 
professional tool like Ada. (How they get anything done in C++ is beyond 
me!) They'd be better off with Python or some such language.

> (I work at Ubisoft Montreal. Yesterday
> my boss was asking about my website and I told him I did it in Ada. You 
> know
> what he asked me: 'Ada... is it not an old programming language?'. By old 
> he
> meant dead; Ada needs a nice haircut.) To me it looks like you want to 
> keep Ada
> and the accompanying discourse for yourself. Am I wrong?

I've put virtually my entire life into Ada, and as such I don't want others 
to come in and destroy the very properties that make Ada attractive in the 
first place. That would make my entire life a waste. I have absolutely no 
problem with new ideas that don't harm the good things about Ada.

>4. A PM/PR ... yeah it is for open source projects. If you took the time to
> check code.dlang you would have get it from the start. You can keep your
> proprietary stuff for you alone, on your MUCH better VCS system than
> what is in main use. Oh btw, I myself solved the problem for a quantum
>computer. It is in my basement... but I cant show you its proprietary stuff
>and I lost the key to enter the vault too... sorry.

What the heck are you babbling about here?

I was talking about the various things we've made available as open source 
or freely available over the years. Did you know that there is an open 
source subset of Claw? (Probably not, we've never made that very clear on 
our website.) We used to provide floppy disks of free Ada software back in 
the days before the internet and "Open Source". It's that sort of stuff that 
I was talking about.

> 5. Would you mind stop musing about your realizations and views of the
> world in precise topic forum threads. It slides the discussion into 'not
> constructive land'. Thank you.

????

Surely everyone's opinions are influenced by their world view. That's 
clearly going to show through from time-to-time. And the notion that 
everyone stay precisely on topic in an Internet thread is laughable. It 
drives my nutty sometimes (especially on the ARG list where I need to file 
the mail on the appropriate AI), but it's part of the territory.

>6. All your knowledge about software architecture, maybe you could put it 
>to
>good use by writing a book and/or making free software so people like me
>could study your code and learn. If you already did please direct me.

No time for a book, sadly; I have to earn money to live on. Maybe when I 
retire.

As far as software goes, Claw is probably my best work, and of course as I 
noted earlier the sample version is open source. Hopefully, NC-Sockets will 
be available soon as well. I've thought about making Janus/Ada open source, 
but quite honestly I find the code quality embarassing and thus don't really 
want others to see the code. :-) [Large parts of Janus/Ada were constructed 
before I really understood software engineering, plus it is primarily Ada 83 
code so a lot of structuring choices that we have now were not available.]

> My one cent... to put my false humility on the back of deflation.

???

The price was one cent when my mother was little, so I'm pretty sure 
everyone's opinion is worth more than that today. :-)

                                 Randy.