Re: LuaBatteries.org ?

[Reuben Thomas <rrt@...>]

On 28 August 2010 17:25, Patrick McCavery <patrick@cakeandfile.com> wrote:
> It is my understanding that the Lua team is focused on the core language

That's right.

> and generally tries to build mechanisms for programmers to work in their own way.

To a certain extent, but the important point is that yes, the official
Lua distribution does not "include batteries", unless you are only
interested in programming over the scope of the C standard library
plus regexs and coroutines.

> I support this but there are also many calls for more libraries.

Right. You might want to reflect on that together with the next item:

> I was wondering if other community members would like to start a new site
> specifically for creating libraries for the language.

We have been here before, so you really need to be more precise about
the problem you'd like to solve, and how you aim to solve it.

For example, there are already several attempts to make reusable
libraries for Lua, including the various libraries that are part of
Kepler and my own stdlib project. There has also been work on making
it easy to distribute them (LuaRocks).

> I know we already have LuaForge but I think that a new site with an explicit
> purpose might serve us all well.

It seems to me that what is really missing is "CLAN", à la CTAN and
CPAN. This is a different sort of beast from LuaForge, you're dead
right. I also suspect that most of the necessary work for packaging
and distributing reusable libraries has already been done, and what is
needed is a single recognised place from which to distribute it.

As a library maintainer, I'd certainly be happy to have a single
obvious place from which to distribute. I think also that providing
the infrastructure for distributing code is likely to be much more
productive and useful than trying to produce a single set of
"standard" libraries.

Since I'm somewhat out of the Lua loop these days (I only read this
message because of the new list's not preserving my "delivery
disabled" setting), I apologise if I've missed any obvious work, but
it would illustrate my point: the place to start is definitely the
shoulders of the (right) giants.

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