Re: Putting version information, description, copright into modules

[Hisham <h@...>]

On 11 February 2016 at 10:38, Peter Aronoff <telemachus@arpinum.org> wrote:
> On Thursday, February 11, 2016 at 02:25PM, Dirk Laurie wrote:
>> 2016-02-11 12:17 GMT+02:00 Jonathan Goble <jcgoble3@gmail.com>:
>>
>> > Standardization would be wonderful.
>>
>> LuaRocks could be a good place for that. Define standards for metadata
>> that the module table should conform to, publish a list of modules that
>> meet it. A program could maintain that list.
>>
>> No censorshop: LuaRocks can still accept any module via the present
>> uploading protocol. Only, if they're nonstandard they can be installed
>> but re not on the good guys list.
>
> Yes, please. Hisham, thoughts?

A practical difficulty in implementing that is that, due to the fact
that we support multiple build systems*, we don't have a list of
specific _modules_ published by each rock. We don't build the rocks
server-side (because of external dependencies), so we can't perform
this kind of analysis in modules (especially C modules).

One idea that occurred to me once was to extend the rockspec upload
protocol so that `luarocks upload` also posted to the server a list of
modules a rock contains, based on the copy built locally by the rock
author.

* ~80% of rocks in luarocks.org use our builtin build system, from
which we _could_ extract a list of modules, but Torch for example
seems to use mostly cmake-based rockspecs.

-- Hisham