Re: LuaBatteries.org ?

[Chris Babcock <cbabcock@...>]

On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 11:27 AM, Reuben Thomas <rrt@sc3d.org> wrote:

> 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).

LuaRocks compares favorably in my own use experience with Python's
easy_install. The only gotcha is that you need to make sure that you
are calling the right instance of the luarocks executable for the
environment you are working on (if you have more than one Lua
environment accessible to the current user), which isn't that hard
compared to the problems that Python virtualenv is meant to solve.

>> 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.

Given the thread title, I suspect that the Python Package Index is the
inspiration here. While I don't miss "batteries" in Lua because
Python's extensive standard library really didn't address my specific
need, I did spend a lot of time browsing LuaRocks.org before I
actually got down to writing Lua code. There is a ton of coolness
there. Maybe this resource is just under-publicized and underutilized.

It doesn't look terribly difficult to package programs as Rocks, so
maybe all that's missing is customization to the LuaRocks.org Sputnik
instance to enable maintainers to manage their own contributions. I
don't think that I'm on that mailing list yet, but I'll forward this
tomorrow.

Chris Babcock