I've seen the comment in Ada rapporteur group in which you mention this project.
I think that providing a way for distributing libraries without being tight to a particular platform or compiler is important for achieving an ecosystem of open source libraries around Ada.
Additionally, having a standardized solution for building complex systems would avoid the current problem that c++ packages have due to the wide variety of package managers, which causes that libraries packaged for one of them cannot be consumed by the others (as a result, sometimes several package managers need to be used for building a single project).
On the other hand, languages in which package management is a key feature, like Java, python or rust, heavily simplify this task. This has helped their library ecosystem and usage to grow, due to how easy is to use them in your projects.
In particular, I like that Java and python provide "standardized" packaging formats for distributing libraries (jar and wheel files), which heavily simplify consuming them even without using a package manager (python requires installing them with pip install library.whl, but it can still be done easily if the package isn't available at pip's repository.
Contrarily, languages like Ada and C require manually copying the entire code base in order to consume the library. Even if it gets precompiled as a static library, specification files or headers need to be provided separately, which makes it significantly harder to use them. In c and c++ this is sometimes solved by making header only libraries (which are harder to maintain and can increase compilation times), but GNAT forces using separate specification and body files, impeding during something like that in Ada (at least without being tight to a particular compiler).
For that reason, some time ago I proposed in https://github.com/Ada-Rapporteur-Group/User-Community-Input/issues/19 including a compiler independent file format for package distribution in Ada standard (e.g. a zip file containing all the source files and a manifest). That format should allow also including the documentation and resources needed by the library (configuration files, bitmaps...). The idea is that consuming a library that just uses standard Ada code would just require specifying the location of that archive, instead of all the specification files.
Looking at AURA docs, I could just find how to consume local or git repositories. Does AURA support something like that?
I've seen the comment in Ada rapporteur group in which you mention this project.
I think that providing a way for distributing libraries without being tight to a particular platform or compiler is important for achieving an ecosystem of open source libraries around Ada. Additionally, having a standardized solution for building complex systems would avoid the current problem that c++ packages have due to the wide variety of package managers, which causes that libraries packaged for one of them cannot be consumed by the others (as a result, sometimes several package managers need to be used for building a single project).
On the other hand, languages in which package management is a key feature, like Java, python or rust, heavily simplify this task. This has helped their library ecosystem and usage to grow, due to how easy is to use them in your projects.
In particular, I like that Java and python provide "standardized" packaging formats for distributing libraries (jar and wheel files), which heavily simplify consuming them even without using a package manager (python requires installing them with pip install library.whl, but it can still be done easily if the package isn't available at pip's repository.
Contrarily, languages like Ada and C require manually copying the entire code base in order to consume the library. Even if it gets precompiled as a static library, specification files or headers need to be provided separately, which makes it significantly harder to use them. In c and c++ this is sometimes solved by making header only libraries (which are harder to maintain and can increase compilation times), but GNAT forces using separate specification and body files, impeding during something like that in Ada (at least without being tight to a particular compiler).
For that reason, some time ago I proposed in https://github.com/Ada-Rapporteur-Group/User-Community-Input/issues/19 including a compiler independent file format for package distribution in Ada standard (e.g. a zip file containing all the source files and a manifest). That format should allow also including the documentation and resources needed by the library (configuration files, bitmaps...). The idea is that consuming a library that just uses standard Ada code would just require specifying the location of that archive, instead of all the specification files.
Looking at AURA docs, I could just find how to consume local or git repositories. Does AURA support something like that?