Re: Where to publish Lua modules?

[Sam Roberts <vieuxtech@...>]

On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 1:48 PM, Marc Balmer <marc@msys.ch> wrote:
> While this seems technically possible, it means quite some work.  And I
> don't really want the files history to be public, the commit messages
> often contain internal stuff.

Fair enough. You can rewrite all the history with git pretty easily,
but it takes some work, for sure.

> Publishing as tarballs seems best to me, although already that means
> additional work for not much gain... ;)

If all you want to do is kick your tarballs out to the world, in the
hopes that might be useful, but you're not looking for collaboration,
the easiest way, IMO, would be to stick them on a page inside your
company website (opensource.msys.ch?), with enough html to describe
its purpose that webcrawlers can identify it, and call it done.

You could make it more easy to find with google by linking from the
lua wiki, or perhaps blogging about it somewhere or adding a
freshmeat.net page, and if anybody ever posts to the lua list with a
problem your code helps with, you can mention it to them.

If you want to build some kind of community around it (doesn't sound
like you do), and hope to get useful code back, or at least bug
reports back, you need a project hosting site, like sourceforge. I'm
not a huge sourceforge fan, though I use it for libnet, but I just
haven't been able to find anything better, yet. I'd love to here of
alternatives.

But, if you really hope to get code back, then you need to encourage
people to make changes in a place where you can see their changes, and
that means github or the mercurial or bzr equivalents. With tarballs,
they'll download, commit into their repos, improve them, and you'll
never see it. Of course, getting patches is a PITA, they usually need
rewriting, and probably do things you don't want, so maybe you want to
discourage feedback!

All IMHO of course.

Cheers,
Sam