Alire mandates use of GitHub account?

Question

I went to try out the Alire package manager for Ada the other night, and found this in the documentation:

Issue alr init --bin myproj (you can use --lib for a library project)

The first time you run this command, alr will ask a couple of questions to automatically fill-in information about the crate:

GitHub login: is used to identify the maintainer of the crate when contributed to the community index. Full name: Name of the author of the crate Email address: Point of contact to author of the crate

All the questions are optional for now, you can just press enter to use the default values.

This "All the questions are optional for now" is somewhat concerning in that it implies they will be mandatory in the future.

This seems like a very strange design choice. I do not have or want a GitHub account, and while I understand that Alire needs to pull from GitHub to retrieve crates I would think that an account should not be required to clone public repositories. I do not want to become overly reliant in the Alire ecosystem if I will effectively become locked out of it in future.

I have not found any discussion or timeline around when Alire will start requiring a GitHub account - is this truly the case, and if so when will it become mandatory?

Answer 1

It is not at all required to have a GitHub account to use Alire.

On the other hand, a GitHub account is required to publish a crate in the community index. That's because the current procedure requires one to open a pull request on the alire-index repository. And this is why Alire is asking you to provide a GitHub login.

But as you saw in the documentation this is optional.

"for now" doesn't imply that it will be mandatory in the future for sure. I think the intent was to express that it might be a possibility.

Answer 2

These instructions appear among the First steps in Creating a new crate, likely required to initialize the corresponding local git repository, as shown here. Particular values would seem relevant only when Publishing your projects in Alire and establishing Crate ownership. I would infer that now in this context means while getting started. In any case, you can examine and change these settings as shown here. Going forward, additional restrictions on using a work would violate the project's existing license terms.^†

^†_{Disclaimer: Neither affiliated with nor a current user of the Alire project.}