Finding good Lua add-ons (Was: Is there an #include equivalent)

[Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@...>]

Roberto and Luiz are by definition the two most experienced Lua
programmers and the ones who understand best what the current
version of Lua is designed to do. They also are (and this is not
the same thing) very good Lua programmers who write clear code
and terse but complete documentation.

Yet they claim no privileged position for the modules they write.
One has to find these like gold and diamonds by laboriously mining
in deep shafts or by sifting through tons of alluvial sand.

The following example is typical. In the recent thread, he tenth
contribution, reacting to an underinformed comment in the seventh,
was this:

2014-09-18 19:02 GMT+02:00 Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo <lhf@tecgraf.puc-rio.br>:
>> Lua files are not self-contained executables. And there is no way to
>> produce one without great hackery (that I know of).
>
> I don't think srlua is great hackery...
>         http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lhf/ftp/lua/#srlua

The poster being replied to was delighted.

> Thanks for sharing this program. It looks incredibly useful.

Many people, I suspect, would have given up reading that thread
before spotting this.

Suppose a new Lua user visits www.lua.org. How hard is it to find
the module 'srlua', with a brief summary of what it does and the
not totally irrelevant information that its author is one of the three
inventors? Or even just the andwer to "what Lua modules have
been made by the Lua authors themselves?"

The landing page offers nine topics:

about
news
get started
download
documentation
community
contact
site map
português

and a search box. The last is nearly useless: even if you already
know the name 'srlua', it does not take you there. The best one
is 'site map'. You can click "authors" and go to their individual
homepages.

Luiz wins first prize here. His webpage is short and the words
"tools for lua" clearly marked as a link. His tools page is not
discouragingly long to read, and one soon finds

srlua – A tool for building self-running Lua programs.
5.2 · 5.1 · 5.0

Among the other tools are some that go back as far as 4.0
and some that look forward to 5.3. Well worth a visit!

One has to work harder to find Roberto's stuff: his homepage
only directs you to where you have already been by now. But
on the Downloads page, there are some interesting links in
the Tools section. For example, LuaForge.This has a landing
page that rather looks like the one-page summary of standard
modules that Python programmers are supposed to print out
and keep under their pillows. If you know the name 'srlua',
here it is; so is 'lpeg'. However, there is no page with links
to all Roberto's publicly available modules. You need to know
the name of the subdirectory off Roberto's homepage to access
them. One can find them via Google, of course, e.g. /docs,
/lua, /lpeg, /struct, but since Roberto has not chosen to provide
an index, I'll keep quiet about the others.

Finally, on the Tools section of the Downloads page there is the
modest sentence "See also the Lua Toolbox." Finally one strikes
gold. The entire page, maintained by Pierre Chapuis, consists of
entries like this:

luafilesystem
File System Library for the Lua Programming Language
Endorsed by: moteus, develCuy, Hisham and 15 others.
Labels: filesystem

Name of module, what it does, who think it is good, and in some
cases, a label directing you to a section where only the modules
with that label are listed.

I'll have to work on the fact that I'm nowhere listed as someone
who endorsed a module — neither are certain other equally loud
denizens of lua-l. There's a SignUp box ready for us to use.
It is not stated what one must to to avoid merely being grouped
among "and 15 others" but I suspect that endorsing enough
modules will do it.