RE: community project?

["Andre Carregal" <carregal@...>]

> It would we awesome if LuaForge was an off-the-shelve
> application which
> would handle all/most of the above functionalities either by
> providing
> them itself or by seamlessly interfacing with them.

Well, it happens that LuaForge uses a kind of off-the-shelf application...
but it also happens that it is called GForge and is written in PHP... :o)

GForge (www.gforge.org) is a spin off of the original SourceForge system,
and I can tell you it's a huge beast to handle. Once it is running you have
a lot of power, but until then you've better check some man pages here and
there.

LuaForge is just a site that uses GForge to offer some services. Yes, there
are some custom text and logos here and there, but 99% of what you see is
pure GForge.

> And now lets go to the drawing board :)

While I agree that a sample/reference web application would be a great
addition to the Lua community, I would not mess with versioning, community
stuff (mail, forums etc) or issue tracking, at least for now.

As you said, we could start with a wiki based system to help following up
projects for example. If someone has the starting point, there should focus
the development effort. Why not try to allow multiple text converters (aka
wiki syntaxes), different storage strategies (file system, databases) and/or
flexible output options (HTML, XML, RSS, PDF, DocBook etc)?

Think of it as a pluggable Wiki engine. From the standing point of a demo
system, it would show a lot of Lua characteristics, but mostly if it managed
to be small, portable, easy to use, extendable and maintainable.

My point is, why rewrite a system like GForge (or even Trac)? It's already a
great piece of software, it is maintained by a nice developer base and the
fact that it uses PHP does not pose any threat to Lua as a development
platform.

Andre Carregal