Re: Lua library bank? (Was: Ruby philosophy vs Lua philosophy

[Pierre-Yves Gérardy <pygy79@...>]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 11:39 AM, Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Somewhere the thread changed course from not just Ruby vs Lua
> to that reliable old performer, Lua's lack of "batteries".
> [...]
> Do we really need another library bank? We have luarocks.
> It's a pons asinorum. Packaging something as a rock is just tricky
> enough to eliminate the nine-day wonders and let through only
> those authors with a little staying power.


Component.js [0] and the Julia Pkg system [1] both use git as backend
(and GitHub as default host).
Julia packages must be registered in a central METADATA.jl repository,
but Componenent is completely decentralized.

    $ component install owner/repo@tag_or_branch

... installs a given component from GitHub. You can also provide a
full URL for packages hosted elsewhere. Component has a central search
index, but it is optional.

If a new package system were to be designed, it would be great to use
them as inspiration. In both cases, creating/uploading a package is trivial
(if you're a bit familiar with git).

> What we do need is something like Amazon's user review
> system. I need say a json reader, the LuaWiki lists several and
> it's really hard to figure out which to try first. It's not going be the
> same for everyone. But with a user review system I can see
> which product gets a good rating from people with my sort of
> setup.

Hosting all packages on GitHub does not give you a star rating system,
but you can see how popular a given package is, how reactive the
author is to bug reports, etc..

-- Pierre-Yves

[0] https://github.com/component/component
[1] https://github.com/JuliaLang/METADATA.jl