[ANN] Penlight 1.3 Request for Comment

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

Hi all,

Penlight [1] is a set of general utility Lua libraries, which started
out as an attempt to imitate the Python standard libraries (e.g
strings & Lists, path, dir) and grew in its own eccentric fashion
thereafter.  Docs are here[2]; you can grab the 1.3.0 tag as an
archive or do:

$ sudo luarocks install
http://stevedonovan.github.com/files/penlight-1.3.0-1.rockspec

Change list is here [3]. Thanks particularly to John Schember and
Thijs Schreijer as chief collaborators for this release, although
every small contribution has been greatly appreciated. This is the
first release that works fine with Lua 5.2 in non-5.1-compatible mode;
pl.compat handles the differences.

There have been a number of fixes, and fans of pl.lapp will appreciate
that short flags can now always be followed by the value without a
space, e.g -I/path/to/file.

This is a pre-release release, since I'd really like comments about
the pl.Date class[4] before there's a proper release that goes into
the LuaRocks repo.  Dates are not easy, and John has tried to make
pl.Date more robust and correct.  So there have been changes; toUTC
and toLocal return a new date; DST is accounted for (say if you add
two months to an BST date in September the time will remain the same).
 __tostring returns a format appropriate to serialization (ISO 8601)
although not so friendly for humans (as the discussion about tostring
and floats indicates, there is always tension between precise and
friendly presentation of date).  We had some debate about the public
API here, since John dislikes the OOP style, whereas I simply find it
convenient.

Since the otherwise excellent luadate seems to have become
unmaintained, the idea is to get a robust package that does what it
does well, and works for people who have to deal with DST.

steve d.

[1] https://github.com/stevedonovan/Penlight
[2] http://stevedonovan.github.io/Penlight
[3] https://github.com/stevedonovan/Penlight/blob/master/CHANGES.md
[4] https://github.com/stevedonovan/Penlight/blob/master/lua/pl/Date.lua