Re: any easy 'batteries-included' way of installing Lua on linux (ubuntu to be specific)

[Jayanth Acharya <jayachar88@...>]

On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 4:32 PM, Pierre Chapuis <catwell@archlinux.us> wrote:
> On Fri, 4 Mar 2011 00:37:39 +0530, Jayanth Acharya wrote:
>
>> Okay... but is there anything like a "golden package of rocks" /
>> "extensions" -- something that most developers use, i.e. most
>> developers use for the common purpose (e.g. parsing XML, templating,
>> bit-operations etc.). Going through the rocks catalog for instance, I
>> found that there are several of those, for same purpose, so how do I
>> pick & choose. Do I stick to the ones supplied by Ubuntu repos, or go
>> beyond, and if I do -- which ones ??
>
> Would you like something like http://ruby-toolbox.com/? I use it when
> I have to search for a Ruby Gem, and sometimes miss it for Lua. It makes
> it trivial to find choices and pick those you should evaluate.
>
> Is there something like this in the Lua community? The wiki comes close
> but the interface is not as easy to use.
>

ruby-toolbox.com seems very interesting as a concept. in fact this
concept is used in many other areas of software s.a. preconfiguring
build image, and downloading the customized build image. makes the
task of config flag twiddling a non-issue, which is generally
considered to be a rather high entry-barrier for newbies. ruby-toolbox
has a social-network tinge to it (popularity, community recommendation
etc. -- which is very helpful).

my main desire for 'batteries' is not so much for it's load-and-fire
use, but rather the convenience of not having to look/try/compare
modules/packages especially where there are more than one performing a
task and be able to bank on someone more experienced (and possibly
smarter) than me, to have done that for me, s.t. i could get
productive sooner.

for instance, i am not sure what to go with, when it comes to --
 OOP with Lua
 base64 encoding
 Concurrancy
 HTTP client library

that is just a representative set. at the moment, i am just around
48hours into Lua, so some obvious things look challenging as well.

thanks,
Jay