Re: package proposal

[Reuben Thomas <rrt@...>]

On Fri, 17 Sep 2004, Roberto Ierusalimschy wrote:

> This is a proposal for a more standard package usage in Lua.

Sorely needed, and good to see it's being done. I like the way that 
pre-compiled and Lua modules are treated uniformly. This is important.

> * A *package* is a collection of modules distributed together.
> Each *module* lives in single file, which contains a single module.
> (Of course, a package may comprise a single module.)

I'm skeptical of these definitions. I like the namespace rules, but I'm 
not sure why packages need to exist (are package-relative module names 
really useful?), nor what "distributed together" means. In particular, 
packages seem to be ocnfused with namespaces: why shouldn't 
independently-distributed modules providing related functionality be 
grouped into a package (and even require one another)?

The "one file = one module" rule is arbitrary and wrong. Most languages 
with a decent module system don't have it. Modules are effectively types 
(= namespaces), not physical units of code. Of course, there's nothing 
wrong with demanding that each module be loaded by a single file.

I think, all in all, this proposal suffers from feature bloat. Yes, the 
current various namespace/module schemes need to be accommodated, and 
yes, a credible standard is needed so we can stop worrying about how to 
integrate code from different sources. But this won't be done by being 
too complex.

The CPAN model might offer some lessons here: from a code writing (as 
opposed to packaging) point of view, it's almost trivial to write a new 
CPAN module, and yet it provides an effective way for programmers to 
contribute to the massive pool of Perl it provides.

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