Alire: a library repository manager for the open source Ada ecosystem

Open source movements are main players in today''s software landscape. Communities spring around programming languages, providing compilers, tooling and, chiefly, libraries built with these languages. Once a community reaches a certain critical mass, management of available libraries becomes a point of contention. Operating system providers and distributions often support but the most significant or mature libraries so, usually, language communities develop their own cross-platform software management tools. Examples abound with languages such as Python, OCaml, Rust, Haskell and others. The Ada community has been an exception to date, perhaps due to its smaller open source community. This work presents a working prototype tailored to the Ada compiler available to open source enthusiasts, GNAT. This tool is designedfrom two main principles: zero-cost infrastructure and a pure Ada work environment. Initially available for Linux-based systems, it relies on the semantic versioning paradigm for dependency resolution and uses Ada specification files to describe project releases and dependencies