GitHub-hosted Ada Reference Manual

General
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Some folks have had trouble reaching ada-auth.org on occasion. There is now a “mirror” of some of the Ada Reference Manuals on a GitHub-hosted site:

https://ada-rapporteur-group.github.io/

It is very reliable and very fast, so probably the better place to use for daily access.

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I’m one of those experiencing trouble connecting to ada-auth.org.
It’s usually just a warning that the connection is not encrypted and some 30 seconds of waiting but it goes through. However, that’s far from ideal and this Github mirror may prove very useful – so thanks to all involved.

Let me note a persistent problem I’ve encountered when dealing with ARM as a beginner.
Right now, I see four options for working with ARM:

  1. browsing the online HTML version
  2. browsing a local HTML version
  3. reading the PDF
  4. reading the plaintext version

Each of those has problems for someone unaccustomed to the document.
Let me explain:

  1. the online HTML version has connectivity issues for some
  2. the local version cannot be searched locally because it depends on some CGI service that is hosted at ada-auth.org (also connectivity issues)
  3. the PDF has no table of contents and the text TOC is non-interactive - this hampers navigation
  4. the plaintext lacks the many niceties of HTML or PDF, but at least it can be grepped and this is actually what I’m forced to use right now because it’s the easiest thing to look up new things :frowning:

Now the Github mirror looks promising, but as it turns out its search function depends on the same ada-auth.org CGI, so from my perspective offers no immediate advantage over a local set of HTML pages.

I find this situation unfortunate, because ARM is a rather nice piece of work (I say this as someone who looked into POSIX and C++ standards) that can be read by a beginner like me.

That’s a lot of words to really say that, at least for me, dealing with ARM is not as smooth as it could be. I wish I could offer a remedy, but sadly I know none of the modern web technologies. My assumptions is this could be solved with money, so perhaps an idea for a community fundraiser is worth floating.

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We will slowly be moving everything to GitHub, including the search capability. We might try to implement a GitHub-local search sooner than that if possible, because as you point out, if you do a lot of searching, you are back to waiting on ada-auth.org.

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Quick question. I know the process will be to move everything over eventually, but wanted to check if it is ok for a person to self host the documents on their own github repo or does that run afoul of copyright / license?

Asking because in the mean time that’ll allow me to pull down local copies of documents not yet hosted on the ARG github webpage (such as older RM versions, rationale, overview, etc).

I feel like it should be ok, but wanted to check.

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Feel free, but of course preserve any copyrights.

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Thanks!

I would just be loading up the html files in a premade directory structure, no content changes, so the copyrights and all the info should be preserved.

This is mostly for things like the rationale and the 95 rm stuff and older. Using github as a intermediate to get the files over is handy, but I didn’t want to stomp toes the wrong way.

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