Let's discuss the future of alire.ada.dev and ada-lang.io

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Hello everyone,

I would like to open a discussion about the relationship between alire.ada.dev and ada-lang.io.

This is something I briefly discussed with the Alire team, Jemery, and Paul (on the ada-lang.io side), just to make sure everyone was okay with discussing it in public, so to speak.

In the Alire project, we know that alire.ada.dev does not meet the quality and usefulness standards we should expect. Quentin (Heziode) has started working on a new version of the site, which would already be a great improvement, but I think we need a bigger change.

Alire.ada.dev was published before ada-lang.io, at the time, there was no real community hub for Ada. I had some expectations that alire.ada.dev or ada.dev could become this central hub. ada-lang.io was published a couple of years after and quickly filled this role. So today we are in a situation where alire.ada.dev is not as good as it should be, ada.dev is inexistent, and ada-lang.io and its forum are the de facto community hub. In this context, I think it makes sense to bring the two websites closer together.

The main idea would be to have an alire.ada-lang.io or crates.ada-lang.io that serves the Alire documentation and the crate index, replacing alire.ada.dev. We can also consider other extensions in the future, such as the auto-generated documentation website I am prototyping (docs.ada-lang.io?).

I’m opening this topic to get feedback and ideas. What should be done, how it should be done, etc.

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Hi Fabien, thanks for opening this up. We started talking about this in private, and since my questions are still open I’d rather bring them here, they touch more people than just us anyway.

On the principle, I’m on board. ada-lang.io is already where the community actually lives, so consolidating around it is reasonable. A few things I’d want us to settle before committing.

First, ownership. Who owns ada.dev today, AdaCore or someone else? Same question for ada-lang.io, because if it becomes the umbrella for Alire and the rest, we should know who controls the domain and what happens if that person ever steps away. One hub is great for discoverability and less great if it quietly becomes a single point of failure.

Then there’s what actually moves, and who runs it afterwards. The index is a GitHub repo and the website is mostly a front-end sitting on top of it, so I assume this is mainly about the domain and the hosting. Do we stay on GitHub Pages, or treat this as a chance to rethink hosting?

Something we didn’t really discuss: redirects. alire.ada.dev has years of inbound links, bookmarks and search ranking behind it. Whatever we choose, we need proper 301 redirects from the old URLs so we don’t break existing links or send people to dead pages. Better to plan that from day one than to patch it afterwards.

Last one, and it might be a bad idea, so feel free to shoot it down. Both Node and Rust keep the tool and the registry on separate sites (nodejs.org and npmjs.com, rust-lang.org and crates.io). We could do the same: alire.ada-lang.io for Alire itself, and crates.ada-lang.io for the index. It stays clean if the index keeps growing, and it leaves obvious room for docs.ada-lang.io later, like you mentioned. Maybe it’s overkill at our scale and a single site is plenty. No strong opinion, just putting it on the table.

Either way I’m happy to help make it happen, especially since I’m already deep in the redesign.

I will have time this summer (Jully and/or August) to work on the redesign of Alire website.

Quentin

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On the subject of ownership, I think it makes most sense in the long term for the Ada User Society to own ada-lang.io so it’s time to a long-term entity that will have continuity. That isn’t to say that the community wouldn’t continue to publish on the site and such. I think that part is working well.

If we’re embracing Alire as the “official” package manager of the language, it should probably own Alire too.

Ada-lang’s birth was in 2022 from this reddit discussion: yet another Ada web site?

In that thread I brought up some thoughts on the (at the time) sparse resources on modern onboarding to the language. I considered creating an “.io” website for Ada, but didn’t think it was a good idea, mostly because while IO websites are cool, I didn’t want to be at the mercy of the Indian Ocean Territories (and sure enough, .io may be getting deprecated at some point in the future, cementing my concerns). Actually, about 20 days before ada-lang.io was created, I registered getada.dev for the same purpose.

I always hoped in the long term that ada-lang.io, alire.ada.dev, and getada.dev would be integrated under one organization (e.g. Ada User Society) and work together for onboarding and the eco-system for the language the same way rust-lang.org, crates.io, and rustup.rs are managed by the Rust Foundation.

With that being said, I’ve always considered it better to break out into separate TLDs for branding reasons (it’s easier for someone to remember “crates.io” than “crates.rust-lang.org”), but we would have to think hard on how to best leverage that branding, but I’m not SUPER against having everything under a single TLD.

I’m not sure if focusing on crates vs alire is better though; even searching “ada crates” leads to crates.io: Rust Package Registry as the 4th result, and Ada is already notorious for having libraries and names that have much more popular homograph.

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Also the websites https://www.getada.dev/ and https://www.adaforge.org/ and probably more websites targeted at ada beginners.

I would love https://search.ada-lang.io/ to get more features and a better website design. Currently it’s a blank webpage with one search box. Filter options and integration with docs.ada.dev/docs.adacore.com would also be nice! (And some css…)

I guess this will be really messy. I fear that there will be some constraints and long lasting growing pains. Maybe the greenfield approach might be the way…

Kind of a big idea but… making something like the rust foundation but for Ada. Mostly for funding, hosting and some tools.
IIRC Jeremy hosts and pays for the forum, Mosteo handles Alire while AdaCore sponsors it, the Ada Awards Committee holds funds for selected projects and some projects like Ironclad are sponsored by NLnet. (I also got told that alire may get more funding in the future by NLnet but I don’t know the specifics).

Centralizing the funds and hosting the domains would be beneficial in order to gain a better view on how everything is handled. It would also give a direct contact point for organizations that would love to contribute or work with the Ada diaspora. Be it monetary or just working on foss projects.

It might be a bit over the top but at least it gives a good foundation for future growth. You could also put all the other ada sub-communities (e.g. ada-europe, ada-[country], ada user society, adaic and more) together under one umbrella. But I don’t know how these communities are handled and if they even want to join or not.

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Overall, this is a great idea.

I’m personally indifferent whether the domain is ada-lang.io or ada.dev or whatever. It’s ada-lang.io since a lot of other names I tried were unavailable, so I had to get creative.

I handed the reins of ada-lang.io to Jeremy a long while ago. Last I heard the site was still on GitHub pages and this forum still run on Jeremy’s generosity. My only request is ada-lang.io remain independent and not be owned by AdaCore.

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AdaCore owns ada.dev.

This is manageable in different ways, but indeed we need to put in place redirections.

I don’t agree here, I think ada-lang.io is a very good gateway for beginners and I would prefer to have it the only place for beginners to avoid diluting the message.

It’s only one of the reasons why it was a bad idea :wink: . To be serious, and this is somewhat off topic so feel free to open a separate discussion, but the word crate is not strongly used in documentation and communication around Alire, so I think we still have room to change here (again this is off topic for this discussion).

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I sort of touch on this on my response, but I think it makes sense for the Ada User Society to fill this role.

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The Ada User Awards committee is a part of the Ada User Society. Sorry if that wasn’t already clear!

I agree it might be make sense for the Ada User Society to own the domain names. It is about the closest thing we have to an entity like the Rust Foundation.

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Hi all,

I think this discussion is important and I am fully onboard! Thank you for shinning some light on it!

I may be able to shine some light on these matters. AFAIK, @JeremyGrosser is the one footing the bills and the hosting of the infrastructure. He is also taking care of the maintenance of the forums at least. Again, AFAIK, the door was opened for the Ada User Society to take over the page and “manage” it. However, the proposal was refused in the past by the AUS as they did not have the expertise nor energy to take over it. The AUS has grown since then, maybe Jeremy could join the AUS and be named “webmaster”. Those are things that the different parties need to discuss. But I think all sides agree in the main points and are willing to collaborate.

Oh, I don’t think that is happening any time soon! Country-based institutions have a very strong pride. It wont budge :wink:

Hear hear.

I think the AUS needs to mature a bit more and grow its scope beyond the technicalities of the Ada standard and the “old school way” of doing things. I think this is already taking place but it may still take some extra time to mature though.

Again, I am happy with all these proposal. Best regards,
Fer

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I hold the registration for ada-lang.io, though I consider it to be property of the community. I’ll happily transfer it to AUS or another organization if there’s consensus and confidence that it will continue. The domain registration is paid up through 2031, renewal cost is about $50 per year currently.

I haven’t followed the .io drama very closely, but I consider the risk of the domain going away to be low.

There is a single Amazon EC2 t4g.medium instance running the forum, search, and usenet subdomains. This costs about $450 per year. With all of the new AI discovered security vulnerabilities, installing high priority patches is a near daily task now. If you’ve noticed the forum throwing error pages recently, it’s because I’m installing patches and restarting things. Discourse is also available as a hosted subscription for $100/month. I would recommend moving the forum to that service if another organization without a sysadmin were taking it over.

I agree, the existing search is a very simple proof of concept that I put together a few years ago. I would happily hand this off to someone else that wants to rewrite and maintain it. It is written in Python now, not very well. I have rewritten it in Ada, but it had some performance problems when I tried to deploy it and I kinda lost interest. I can share more about that if there is interest.

I’m in favor of centralizing everything under one top level domain, either ada-lang.io or ada.dev. I don’t know who manages ada.dev or what the infrastructure behind it looks like. Whatever we decide, I can setup ada-lang.io redirects with nginx.

I can keep managing the infrastructure independently, but I agree that it would be better if AUS or another organization had access to the accounts to ensure things keep going if I’m unable to. As it stands, I’m a single point of failure.

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It should be able to get a 50% discount on Discuse:

For our 50% non-profit discount, we require a formal document from your government with your non-profit status and exemption from federal taxes (e.g. a 501c3 letter).
source in the FAQ at the end of the page

It’s still more expansive than you current stack, but less anoying to maintain.

@Fabien.C said that it’s AdaCore that own the domain.
About the infra, I don’t think there is anything behind the top TLD (ada.dev), but alire.ada.dev is hosted on Github pages, there is no backend, it’s only a static website host on a CDN

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Setting up and maintaining a 501c3 organization is a lot of work. It requires governance documents, elected trustees, bank accounts, and annual filings. This would cost a lot more than we’d save with the 50% discount.

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AUS is a non-profit org, right ? So if it’s registered in USA, it should have 501c3 lette. Or a’ equivalent if registered in another country, I guess.

But, good point Jeremy, sometimes, a structure is more expansive than what we gain :sweat_smile:

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AUS is registered in Switzerland, and is “de facto” a non-profit organization but not “de jure”.

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Maybe we can also put on the table a rework of the index system of alire.
Currently it’s hosted on GitHub, but some users are worry about that, 'cause Microsoft own GitHub.

Since I work on the redesign of Alire website, maybe we can see how we can work to doing a crates registry that only require users to create an account on alire.domain.com in order to publish a crate.
This is more an ideological question, with deep impact on Alire. Probably @mosteo could have an interesting PoV about that.

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Is ada-lang.io a general Ada learning resource and community or a platform for promoting Alire?

Why does Alire not have it’s own TLD, e.g. alire.io ? This would make more sense vs trying to push the tool through a learning and community site. That idea doesn’t sit well with me.

Indeed. I tried searching for 9p out of curiosity and was meet with this message:

Search too short

Should be 3 characters or more.

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Maybe we can also put on the table a rework of the index system of alire.

The things is that staying free of managed infrastructure is pretty convenient for the resources we have. Any alternative is going to be a very hard sell.

I’m not worried about the index being on GitHub because from `alr`'s PoV it’s (mostly) a plain git repo. So we could migrate at any time to any other hosting, and in fact I’m working on having mirrors in v3.0. We’d lose all the GitHub Actions conveniences, which are currently a lot for being free, but that is something transparent for most users.

The worst impact (for users) of suddenly leaving GH (or being evicted, or priced-out by MS) would be for `alr publish`, that would require again a bit more of manual work. As of today, I consider the risk of being at the hands of MS negligible given that migrating away should be not very disruptive for users. It’s a setting away to start using another index, so we would not even need to hurriedly publish a new `alr` version.

(For development of `alr` itself it would be a worse, as we have lots of safeties in place through CI that should be rewritten from scratch, and maybe paid-for or self-hosted.)

We could though be forward-thinking and start discussing a contingency plan for when GHA cease to be free for public repos and we do have a good reason to migrate.

TL;DR.: I wouldn’t change the index for now unless we’re drowning on support/resources/money. That doesn’t mean other resources that use the index repo can’t be elsewhere out of MS control. Also, I sleep soundly by relying only on git and not some custom backend.

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Hi all,

At Jean-Pierre Rosen’s request, here are my “two cents” (as the CTO of a web agency).

The .io TLD domain is indeed a very poor choice (one we also made back in the day; fortunately, we also have .com, .net, .org, and .fr).

Initially offered at a modest price, the .io domain subsequently rose to an unreasonable annual cost. Representing the Chagos Islands, if I recall correctly — which were effectively evacuated of their population to make way for a U.S. military base leased by the British. Now that the British wish to abandon the territory, Mauritius, despite being very far away, has laid claim to it, and at some point, .io is likely to end up like .su (Soviet Union): discontinued. Since the love of money is universal, the financial aspect might also prevail and save the .io — why kill the goose that lays the golden eggs? But the rules are pretty strict, so I wouldn’t bet on the outcome.

A recovery process is possible. There are certainly territories in the running. There’s money behind it :slight_smile: The Île d’Oléron (located on the French Atlantic coast, between Bordeaux and La Rochelle), a perfect candidate for the .io, could have tried for it, but I can’t see myself alerting and motivating local politicians — we must avoid that sort of thing like the plague.

ada.dev — which currently points to nothing — is obviously a very good domain name.

Which is not the case with ada-lang.io: ada-lang isn’t great, adalang would have been less bad, the hyphen is outdated, and the .io is clearly an expensive choice with an uncertain future.

Finally, using multiple domain names within the same business is a good way to boost SEO by linking the sites to one another. So an alire.dev (or any other TLD) would be a great idea. alire.dev is available and costs 15,49 €/year VAT included at OVH.

I suppose all the discussions on the forum are heading in the right direction to harmonize Ada’s presence on the web and that’s a very good thing :slight_smile:

Stef

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Out of an abundance of caution I’ve registered it just now.