OK, so let's please distinguish smaller problems and tackle them one at a time:
* packaging alire itself for Debian I have raised a couple of issues in the Intent to Package bug[1]. It would be nice if Alejandro and Stéphane could work together to solve them, I don't think there is anything particularly difficult to do. If you want alire in the next stable release of Debian, this must be done by the freeze date in less than a month[2], so please hurry, or wait another 2-3 years for the next stable release (of course, alire can reach unstable and testing much earlier than that). [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1029448 [2] https://release.debian.org/testing/freeze_policy.html With this problem solved, it will become easier for users of Debian to use alire crates by downloading and recompiling sources in their $HOME, as intended for a source package manager. * teach alire about the existing Debian packages alire packaged for Debian should be able to discover existing binary packages like libgtkada, libgnatcoll, xmlezout etc. so that any time a user uses /usr/bin/alr to download and compile a crate, this automatically changes the source dependencies into external (precompiled binary) dependencies. The goal would be to avoid recompiling gtkada etc. for each crate. Discovering existing packages is easy: per Debian Ada Policy, they must depend on the package gnat. Therefore, any package that depends on gnat and whose name ends with -dev should become an "external" dependency instead of a source dependency. It is OK if this feature is optional but I would recommend opt-out, i.e. use installed binary packages by default. It is also OK if this ignores existing Debian packages that are not installed but perhaps alire should warn about their existence and suggest the user install them. * producing more Debian packages from alire crates This is a longer-term goal. As I understand it, there should be a way to turn some source dependencies into external dependencies, where a Debian package exists. Some improvements in alire would be necessary but I don't think it is feasible to do that before the freeze. Therefore, consider this a goal for the next stable release of Debian, which gives you ample time. -- Ludovic Brenta.
