Hi @mosteo,

In the context of GNATdoc development, we are thinking about how tools can get information from the Alire manifest, or anything related to Alire context, settings, and so on.

We see several options:

1. Make the Alire library. In theory, the code is structured so that we can make a library, but there's some work required. One drawback will be that the library will be quite heavy with a bunch of dependencies.
2. Create a small Alire manifest parser library. Something simple, based on Ada-TOML only, would be sufficient to get the basic information (name, version, authors, etc.). Of course that means maintaining another mini "parser" for manifests.
3. Use a machine-readable output from alr show:
   a. There would still be a need to "parse" this output and make it available through an API
   b. How do we communicate this to the tool?
   i. alr exec --some-clever-switch write the content to a file and then pass an option to the tool itself to tell where this file is
   ii. Let the tool run alr show itself

I am opening this issue to discuss and get feedback on those options.