Re: RungeKutta, WalshTransform and Evol

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

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 1:51 AM,  <pj@pjb.com.au> wrote:
> Fair enough, I guess it's my CPAN background... Every new module,
> you submit the name and a description to the newsgroup
> and people dispute what it should be called
> until a consensus emerges.

LuaRocks is (currently) just a delivery system.  Each new module is
posted to the luarocks-dev list and Hisham adds them to the server.
It's hard to see how the process can be automated, you really do need
a human in the loop for basic testing and approval. The way forward is
probably a gang of approved package maintainers, as with Debian.

The amusing/sad thing is that in the Lua universe 'dispute what it
should be called' rarely leads to 'consensus emerges' ;)   We tried to
standardize basic functions like 'map' and couldn't even agree as to
what the arguments should be.

> I think there's a lot of modules running feral outside luarocks.org,
> and the aim should be to be able to consolidate them at some stage,

I dig the use of the word 'feral' because it makes me think of herding
wild cats.  Mostly it's people solving their own needs and sharing the
result, for which we are grateful.  But it can be suprisingly hard to
find out what's there. LuaForge works, in a steam-powered kind of way,
but it doesn't have a long-term future.   I agree that a lot more can
be done with Sputnik, especially with user-editable content (like the
LuaSnippets site) but the LuaRocks developers would say that is not
their job.

BTW, not everyone knows that you can point a browser at
http://luarocks.org/repositories/rocks/ and get a nicely formatted
auto-generated table of contents.

steve d.