Re: Lua library bank?

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 11:52 PM, David Heiko Kolf <kolf@gmx.de> wrote:
> In a standard library I would not just see a list of individually
> maintained "elite" modules, but a single, centrally maintained package
> that consists of a selection of high-quality portable modules in a
> common namespace.

An excellent idea, but we already have a lot of modules that grew
organically, mostly in isolation.  My head is so used to luafilesystem
and luasocket that it would hurt to have to move to something else,
even if it were better engineered and better named. It's hard to tear
up the floorboards if you don't have anywhere else to stay.

But I'm not sure what you're proposing; is it a _distribution_?  We
already have these. Best candidate so far is the 'Lua for Batteries'
binaries as listed on the front page of http://luadist.org/.

Here's the (somewhat outdated) list of packages contained:
https://gist.github.com/drahosp/3945996

It's a work in progress - contains both IUP and wxLua, but only for
Windows. (They're both real bitches to build portably)

Both Ryan and I agree that this is in fact the new Lua for Windows,
except that it's no longer just for Windows!  For that we'll add the
examples and try to collect together as much of the documentation as
possible. (A LuaJIT edition would not be difficult to organize)

Of course, the thing about distributions, is that they never exactly
match what you want.  These batteries (sans examples and docs) weigh
in at 13Meg) although that's small by modern standards.  It's a
schlepp to have to install all of this just to run a little script on
another machine.

But then, that's another topic. A smart packager that only includes
what you need is very possible, since we have Michal's
module-to-package mappings.  It could even be a smart self-extracting
archive.

steve d.