Re: Lua libraries

["Thatcher Ulrich" <tu@...>]

On Jan 29, 2002 at 02:46 -0000, Nick Trout wrote:
> 
> > we need to formalize a system like Perl's one (seems quite 
> > successful for
> 
> To be honest I dont know that much about Perl, I just know its much easier
> to use ppm than it is to try and download a module and install it yourself.

Actually, if you do "perl -MCPAN -e shell" (intuitive, I know :), you
get an interactive shell that finds the package, and does the
downloading and the unzipping for you (and the compiling in some
cases, and the dependency checking, etc).

The first time I used it, I was astonished.  Coming from a Windows
background I'd never seen anything so cool.  Easily impressed I guess.

I don't think Lua really should aspire to be a Perl replacement
though.  In the spirit of keeping things small and simple (which is
not the Perl spirit), I think if we can bless one of the loadlib's as
the preferred one, and establish some baseline conventions for making
packages get along with each other, and start producing our add-ons
within those conventions, then we don't need all the bells and
whistles right away.  We'll have taken a huge and welcome step
forward.

Having to download and unzip a package into a certain directory, and
possibly chase down dependencies, is A-OK in my book, if it means I
can take Lua packages for a test drive without futzing with a
compiler.  Being able to test drive more than one extension at a time
is a crucial feature too.  Also, I think this module effort will help
embedded people as well -- it provides an easy way to evaluate
packages you might want to incorporate in your system.  I for one
would certainly use it in a game engine, at least during development,
given that some of these packages will be things like OpenGL bindings.

-- 
Thatcher Ulrich <tu@tulrich.com>
http://tulrich.com