Re: Wishlists and Modules (was [ANN] libmc)

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 9:30 AM, David Manura<dm.lua@math2.org> wrote:
> I suspect this friction contributes to the reinvent-the-wheel
> phenomena, the perception or reality that reinventing is the simplest
> way to ensure that requirements are met.

Yes, coding is more fun than hunting. Although coders always
underestimate the effort needed to implement something thoroughly. So
'splitting a string' has been done dozens of times, although it's
actually a tricky little piece of code.  Maybe it's also a question of
granuality.  If I just want to split a string, then I might not want
to want to incur the perceived overhead (and resulting dependencies)
of bringing in stdlib or penlight. In that case my needs might be
better met by a clever well-organized snippets database.

> Among other Kwalitee measures [4], this is particularly desirable:
>
>    7 automated configure+build+deploy from source

Yes, those are definitely the measures I was thinking about, allowing
for Lua/Perl deployment differences. With more than 16K modules, the
Perl people need that kind of quality assurance.

> If this were done again, I would not impose hard restrictions C2 in
> documentation format but would use heuristics to render as best it can
> whatever it is given.  I would, however, provide incentives to follow
> one of a couple conventions (e.g. README.txt, LuaDoc, POD, Kepler
> style HTML, POD, etc.).

I've been integrating LuaRocks into Lua for Linux, and resorting to
exactly that. The price of freedom is a whole bunch of very forgiving
code ;)  One sets policy (like 'please provide documentation') but
doesn't insist on rigid implementation and bureaucratic requirements
(like 'there must be an index.html in the docs folder')

>  I would also automatically crawl
> LuaRocks/LuaDist repositories rather than rely on manual submissions.

That's interesting, because historically it's tended to go the other
way, i.e people rockifying packages.  A key insight is that using a
data format like rockspec does not bind one to using LuaRocks.

I'd like to join such an effort, although the queue needs to be
emptied a bit first...

steve d.