Re: Batteries included

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

On Sat, Feb 20, 2010 at 4:47 PM, Alex Combas <alex.combas@gmail.com> wrote:
> Im curious, if there was a "batteries included" version of Lua, which
> packages and libraries would it have?
> Which packages should everyone know about?

Ah, but 'everyone' has different interests and requires different
functionality. So a big installation like Lua for Windows tries to
make as many people as happy as possible.  Even so, people have
specialized needs and then that's when you need some kind of package
manager to easily find stuff (like LuaRocks or LuaDist)

With Lua for Linux, I was trying to define a more compact core
(luafilesystem,luasocket,lposix,alien,lua-expat,...) mostly from the
Kepler stable and then use LuaRocks to fill in the gaps, via a pretty
GTK-based visual interface (no reason why Linux people can't do click
'n drool as well!)

This transforms the problem into the one of making sure that there are
rocks for most Lua packages out there.

GUI toolkit bindings are a headache, people have strong feelings.
There are many to choose from, although IUP is the closest you will
get to a 'canonical' Lua GUI binding. They tend to be hard to make
into rocks, because of their external dependencies.

I suppose we could look at LuaForge and check out the downloads of
each package...

steve d.