Is alire.ada.dev maintained?

pchapin · March 13, 2025, 9:46pm

Two days ago there was an announcement on the Reddit Ada sub that Alire 2.1.0 has been released. In fact, on ada-lang.io the download link for Alire offers version 2.1.0. However, on alire.ada.dev, the main download link still points to version 2.0.2. This leads me to wonder if the alire.ada.dev site is being actively maintained, or what the story might be. The alire.ada.dev site feels like the main site for Alire, yet it also seems out of date. Is ada-lang.io a more appropriate resource for Alire material?

Thanks!

jere · March 13, 2025, 10:46pm

The github repo for the site is: GitHub - alire-project/alire.ada.dev: Official website for the project

It’s maintained, but I would bet that the maintainer is just busy (not a paid job or team associated with alire). If you can’t wait, you can try doing a pull request with the changes and that might speed it up (and I am sure the maintainer would welcome any help he can get).

simonjwright · March 14, 2025, 8:39am

I wanted to make this update, which is plain enough, but there are some other macOS-related changes that I’d like to make but can’t find where the text is kept!

It doesn’t help that there’s no Issues page.

pchapin · March 14, 2025, 11:46am

I can appreciate that volunteers have limited resources. It’s nice that the site accepts pull requests. Still, it seems weird to me for the release to be announced in one venue (Reddit in this case) before it is actually available on the official site.

Several years ago I was the maintainer of an open source project. That meant I was responsible for making releases happen. I had a checklist. After building and testing the installers, one of the steps was to make the release available on the official channels and then announce it to the world. The race condition was if someone noticed the release was available before it was announced, which seems far better than if it is announced before it is available.

What happened in this case makes the community seem fractured and uncoordinated. Don’t the people who create the releases talk to the people who run the web site? Why should a random community member make a pull request to update the site to reflect the release? Shouldn’t the people who create the release do that? As an outsider, it looks messy.

To put it a different way: I’m working with some students this summer on an Ada project. They are new to Ada, so I’m planning to give them a tutorial over the coming weeks. I want to start by saying, “Go to alire.ada.dev and download the latest version of Alire.” However, that doesn’t work! Instead I have to say, “Go to ada-lang.io and download the latest version of Alire, but use alire.ada.dev for the documentation.” They are naturally going to ask, “Why is it like that?” How do I answer them?

My students are currently in a Rust class, but are interested in learning about Ada. The Rust community seems far more coordinated than the Ada community. This issue… the very first exposure the students will have to Ada… doesn’t create a good impression.

mgrojo · March 14, 2025, 7:03pm

ada-lang-io takes the latest release from https://api.github.com/repos/alire-project/alire/releases/latest so it is enougth to have a new release in the GitHub project for this site to be updated. See:

github.com/ada-lang-io/ada-lang-io

docusaurus.config.js

151f94b5c


      
          // @ts-check
          // Note: type annotations allow type checking and IDEs autocompletion
          
          const { themes } = require("prism-react-renderer")
          
          const gitHubUserName = "ada-lang-io"
          const gitHubProjectName = "ada-lang-io"
          
          const alireDefaultVersion = "v1.2.1"
          const alireGitHubLatestRelease = "https://api.github.com/repos/alire-project/alire/releases/latest"
          
          /** @type {import('@docusaurus/types').Config} */
          const config = {
            "title": "ada-lang.io, an Ada community site",
            tagline: "Readable, correct, performant",
            url: "https://ada-lang.io",
            baseUrl: "/",
            onBrokenLinks: "throw",
            onBrokenMarkdownLinks: "warn",
            favicon: "img/favicon.ico",

But the Alire site uses the default determined by the GitHub action alire-project/setup-alire. It is still 2.0.2 there, see

github.com/alire-project/setup-alire

action.yml

678ded26f


      
          name: 'Alire Setup'
          description: 'Install Alire package manager'
          author: 'Alire Project'
          
          inputs:
            version:
              description: Use this argument to install a stable or nightly release. Use a version number without v prefix, e.g., 1.0.1, 1.1.0, or 'nightly'. This argument will be ignored if a branch argument is supplied. Defaults to the latest stable release.
              required: false
              default: '2.0.2'
              # Also to be updated in test-cache-yml
            branch:
              description: Use this argument to install a development branch (e.g., master).
              required: false
              default: ''
            toolchain:
              description: Arguments to pass to `alr toolchain` after setup.
              required: false
              default: 'gnat_native gprbuild'
            msys2:

Mosteo is already on it, but it seems that the update is failing at some point:

pyj · March 15, 2025, 5:11am

The biggest champion of community building is @Irvise, with his vision being a multi-year effort. It seems to be working with the return of the half-day Ada Dev Room at FOSDEM and the forum here being more active.

The community and available resources are spread out among many different parties. ada-lang.io is a community site, there’s not a real maintainer, though @JeremyGrosser keeps it and these forums running.

Most of the open source community seems to revolve around GNAT, since that’s freely available. The AdaCore folks seem to do their own thing, which makes sense since they’re paid to support clients of their stack based on GNAT, but they make a lot of things available to the community and do respond to GitHub issues. They also run learn.adacore.com, which is a great tutorial site, and you see them in here from time to time. I’m not sure what the story is with Alire.

This issue… the very first exposure the students will have to Ada… doesn’t create a good impression.

It’s not great yet, but the situation is remarkably improved since I started writing Ada in mid 2021. I saw where it was and it’s a night and day difference if you want to write open source Ada.

Since 2021, we’ve seen Alire 1.0, significantly improved VS Code support, learn.adacore.com improvements, a new code formatter released (GNATformat), ada-lang.io, AdaCore licensing changes to make libraries more permissive, this forum started, a new ARG page, multiple “package of the year” competitions, toolchain installation with Alire and associated cleaning up of toolchain issues, gnatprove runnable with Alire, there’s now a Ada community meeting most months, https://www.getada.dev/, and probably more stuff that I’m forgetting about.

We still need more varied tutorials, walkthroughs and guides.

AJ-Ianozi · March 15, 2025, 12:16pm

The installer is on http://getada.dev but getadanow gives you a lot of good instructions on how to install the platform specific stuff (not sure if it gives you alire though)

jere · March 15, 2025, 4:39pm

I believe getadanow was one of a few websites that David Botton made around the time when he released the original Gnoga browser GUI library. He also made learnadanow which I don’t think exists anymore, but back in the day (2014ish maybe) he tried to get a lot of the community excited about ada and tried to get a lot more resources out there (mostly just comp.lang.ada and IRC available at the time, so he was trying to improve). The humming bird mascot came out of some of that effort (along with some other community folks).

I don’t know who the maintainer of getadanow is offhand, but David may have handed it to someone (Blady took over Gnoga, LearnAdaNow disappeared I think).

EDIT: Looks like Gnoga was 2014 and the websites and mascot were in 2015
Gnoga Announce: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.ada/c/R1lmoQj6GtY
Websites: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.ada/c/Jx4nadPPxtM/m/mGO-txWVso4J
Mascot: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.ada/c/VDERgHuRkdw/m/IlphRXw9LFUJ

pyj · March 15, 2025, 4:50pm

Oops, this is what I meant to reference – a lot of work went into that – updated my comment.

My point is that “downloading ada and getting started in a ‘modern’ environment for application development” is 10x easier than in 2021.

pchapin · March 19, 2025, 10:53pm

I notice that the link to Alire on the getada.dev site still points to version 2.0.2.

pchapin · March 19, 2025, 10:59pm

There’s no doubt that there are a lot of great developments happening in the Ada community these days. I’m excited about that! With the rising interest in reliable software (why did it take so long?), it seems only natural for Ada to be getting more attention.

My comments about the inconsistency in Alire offerings were meant as an alert about a place that could be handled better, not as a criticism of the efforts many have made to get us here. I apologize if it sounded that way!

I introduced Alire to my students today in an hour long tutorial session, and they seemed fine with the system and happy with how it works. As I mentioned in a different comment, they are currently studying Rust also, and felt at home using Alire as Ada’s cargo alternative.

AJ-Ianozi · March 20, 2025, 1:06am

Ooooh the windows link! I was sourcing alire.ada.dev for that ahahaha

Running curl --proto '=https' -sSf https://www.getada.dev/init.sh | sh will bring in version 2.1.0, but only on macos and x64 linux. This weekend I’m updating getada to support aarch64-linux, let me see if I can auto-generate that windows link on github actions too.

pyj · March 20, 2025, 3:23am

I didn’t take it as a criticism, I definitely get what you’re saying. I was just saying, “it’s gotten so much better, but we need have so far to go and need to keep improving.” It’s encouraging to see more people like yourself you’ve taught the language before – like in your book, which is how I learned SPARK – helping out here.