Re: The Lua Development Process: Why Closed?

[Coda Highland <chighland@...>]

On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 1:50 PM, James Graves
<james.c.graves.jr@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>

And the most popular fork of Lua, LuaJIT, also has a similar
development model and a similarly friendly and responsive maintainer.

/s/ Adam