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Hi,

First of all, sorry about editing the thread subject yet again, but I
would never want to get into a "Rocks vs. anything" situation. :-)

On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 12:11 AM, Norman Ramsey <nr@eecs.harvard.edu> wrote:
>  If the Lua community wants a packaging standard, it had better create
>  a cadre of people who are willing to package 'upstream' software.
>  Most people who create software are too busy creating software to
>  bother with packaging.

The problem of course being that the Lua community (like any
programming language community) consists of people who create
software, unlike Linux distro communities, which have many
non-programmers. Still, often programmers wear the "user" hat as well
and do packaging work. I routinely pack rocks for 'upstream' projects
myself and we've received a number of contributions in the LuaRocks
list for rocks packed by people who are not the projects' primary
authors. So, we're actually starting to see this packaging community
start to form. Of course, the larger the overlap between the developer
and the packager community, the better.

>  All the argument above is independent of the merit of Lua rocks.
>  Unfortunately the Lua rocks effort is clearly at an early stage.

Certainly.

>  There appears to be no document that is the equivalent of the Debian
>  New Maintainer's Guide, and when I looked at the specification, I
>  found it complicated enough to make my head hurt.  (To be fair, the
>  Debian specification made my head hurt too, the first time I read it.)

Thanks for the feedback. We could indeed do better in terms of
entry-level docs, but at this stage of development keeping the spec
docs up-to-date is the priority. One big missing document right now,
which is the next in line to be written, is a tutorial on how to
"petrify" an existing project which uses Makefiles.

>   > > Furthermore, if one happens to be a debian user/developer, debs are
>   > > often more desirable for various reasons, so effort spent making them
>   > > is, at least, not wasted.
>   > and if one is not, these efforts are wasted. but everyone on every
>   > distro can install rocks and use it.
>
>  Turn this around: I'm a Debian user, so I can use a .deb for every
>  program written in every language.  Rocks are only good for Lua
>  programs.  Lua is a fraction of my output and a smaller fraction of my
>  research group's output.  So if I have time to learn only one, I will
>  learn Debian, because I can use it for all the software I write and
>  all the software my students write, not just software written in Lua.

Personally, I find both points of view valid. Efforts spent packing
rocks helps the Lua community as a whole (or at least the part of it
that is willing to use LuaRocks), and efforts spent packing .debs
helps the Debian community as a whole. One might argue that the Debian
community is able to use rocks while the rest of the Lua community
might not be able to use .debs, but from a practical point of view
your argument is certainly decisive.

Returning to the developer/packager distinction, I think that from the
developer side, the most globally helpful course of action is to
provide good Makefiles, that will work nicely for all packagers. I
wrote about the main issues here:

http://www.luarocks.org/en/Recommended_practices_for_Makefiles

In the long run, we expect that other packaging systems will benefit
from LuaRocks as well, so by making LuaRocks attractive to developers
we're not competing with other systems, but factoring out work to be
reused by Debian, Gentoo, Fink, Windows users, etc. We strive to make
LuaRocks play nice to all packaging systems them and we're cooperating
with Enrico and other packagers in the LuaRocks mailing list.

-- Hisham