Show HN: Getada: rustup-like installer for Ada's toolchain/package manager

One of my goals with Ada is to have a one-liner copy-paste terminal command for people to install Ada so they can get to coding in just a few minutes. After extensive testing I feel like it's ready for general release[1].

Getada was inspired by Rustup[2] and aside from the init script is written entirely in Ada.

It's completely open source and you can check out the readme and code on github[3]. It currently supports all non-windows platforms that Alire has an official release for, which at present is Linux (glibc) and MacOS. If you try running it on an unsupported platform, it tries to point you in the right direction. For example, you can install Alire on windows with an already-existing installer.

It downloads the latest version of Alire[4] (Ada's toolchain and package manager, similar to Cargo) for your platform as a zip file to a temporary directory and then extracts it to a binary directory. By default the temporary directory (configure with "-t /directory" or "--tmp=/directory") defaulted to $TMPDIR or /tmp. The config directory is ~/.getada (change via "-c /directory", "--cfg=/directory", or $GETADA_CFG), and the alr and getada binaries go in ~/.getada/bin (configure with ""-b /directory", "--bin=/directory", or $GETADA_BIN). It also tries to add the file to your path by dropping a "env.sh" file into ~/.profile/ (disable with -p or --no-path).

If you don't allow executables in temporary or home directories, you can change all of these via environmental variables or passing parameters.

You can remove it all by running: getada --uninstall

Now you can create a brand new Ada project with: alr init --bin my_project (How to use Alire[5] for more details)

Since one of the biggest complaints about Ada is getting the toolchain [6], I hope this can solve a lot of problems for newcomers to the language.

[1] https://www.getada.dev

[2] https://rustup.rs/

[3] https://github.com/aj-ianozi/getada

[4] https://alire.ada.dev/

[5] https://www.getada.dev/how-to-use-alire.html

[6] https://programming.dev/comment/9438211

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40132373

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