Re: new releases [was Re: Official public code repository]

[Hans Hagen <pragma@...>]

Alex Sandro Queiroz e Silva wrote:
> Hallo,
>
> Tim Kelly escreveu:
> > Roberto wrote:
> >
> >  
> > > I guess there is a difference in scale. The last version of Lua is
> > > less than 2 years old. This is the timescale I am talking about. If
> > > you do not see a new release of Lua in the next 20 years than you
> > > should worry.
> > >     
> >
> > But do I have to worry that in five years the group at PUC-Rio will 
> > tire of Lua and move on to other projects, leaving me looking around 
> > for developers with their patched versions of Lua?  (Universities are 
> > notorious for their "what have you done for me lately" attitude, so 
> > new research and directions is a given, but can come at the expense of 
> > maintainence of existing research projects.)
> >
> >   
>
>     What, do you want a document signed with blood? I am not Roberto, 
> but Lua has existed for 14 years now. I guess they are pretty serious 
> about it. Moreover, let's imagine a world where the Lua authors give up 
> on it tomorrow. Lua is a very stable and bugless piece of code, and that 
> will not change overnight. There are several projects that still happily 
> use Lua 4.0. Besides, there is a very capable and smart community which 
> has written many Lua lines of code that would not disappear overnight 
> too. I bet another maintainer would take over it in no time. Larry Wall 
> and Guido have written roadmaps. What if they die tomorrow?

for luatex we've chose lua over other languages (were not even real 
candidates to be honest); tex (a typographic programming language) 
itself is close to 30 years old, and we want to add another 30 years to 
that; really, the last thing we worry about if lua going away, and one 
of the arguments for using lua (apart from size, liking it, etc) is that 
it's based on research, is hosted at a university, that there is a 
knowledgable community (many pretty high quality posts on this list)

Also, Roberto is a nice guy, which is yet another good reason for 
sticking to lua -)

Hans


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