Re: The Lua Development Process: Why Closed?

[James Graves <james.c.graves.jr@...>]

Rob Hoelz <rob@hoelz.ro> wrote:

> So, the question is (if you couldn't tell from the title): why did the
> authors of Lua decide to adopt a closed development process, and why
> does this continue to this day?  By "closed development process", I
> mean that unlike Perl, Python, Ruby, and other popular open source
> languages, the canonical implementation's development is done by an
> exclusive group, and the "work in progress" tree is not visible to the
> public.  I find this very interesting, especially considering how
> liberal Lua's license is.  I think it would be cool it other developers
> would be able to directly contribute to Lua's development, but maybe
> I haven't spent enough time thinking about this. =)

I think you're asking the wrong question.

If the "closed development process" of Lua was an actual problem to
this language's community, a popular fork would have created long ago.
 This has happened for even major projects recently, like the
OpenOffice / LibreOffice split.

And in fact many forks of Lua do exist now.  Of the languages you
listed above, Lua is at least one or two orders of magnitude easier to
maintain than those.  It is quite reasonable for a single person to
fork Lua and maintain it.  The code base is small enough for even a
single developer to understand and improve.  Contrast that with
OpenOffice, GCC, and other popular projects which require large and
enthusiastic teams to create a viable fork.

So the correct question is: Why is the PUC-Rio version of Lua so popular?

One reason is that Roberto and Luiz and great guys, and they have made
great efforts to help the Lua community.  They are very responsive,
especially in the case of bugs.  Contrast that to most other
(admittedly much larger) language implementations, that have long
lists of bugs, many of which are open for years and years.  Even
documentation problems are taken very seriously, and promptly fixed.
This is wonderful, and many people appreciate it.

Another main area is the design and engineering capability of the core
team.  These guys have done a great job maintaining and enhancing Lua
over the years.  Through their hard work, they have garnered the deep
respect of many, many people.  They have been very careful, and been
good stewards of the language over the years.  They have listened to
all the requests to "enhance" Lua over the years, and paid careful
attention to the ones which actually had merit.

They are doing something that works, and I'm fine with the status quo.

James Graves