Re: LuaRocks search aid, anyone?

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

On Sun, Feb 26, 2017 at 5:17 AM, Martin <eden_martin_fuhrspam@gmx.de> wrote:
> I consider this as open interesting problem with practical need
> and often think about it.

It really is worth thinking about, and other communities discuss this
as well!  First, people use cute names (we all do it). You may choose
to call your daughter Cassandra and your son Penlight but please think
of what the rest of their school class will think!

So, metadata - descriptions full of good keywords to search.  It's
hard to choose that set wisely.  Any classification scheme will be
arbitrary, and so it's non-trivial to pick the right place in the tree
for your package.  (It helps to have a forest of trees, where a
package may appear in multiple locations - we can at least then break
out of the Aristotle classification ghetto).

Dirk is talking about the _discoverability problem_, and it's tricky.
LR has about a thousand modules roughly; Rust has about eight times
that (because it's perhaps _too_ easy to publish a package?) and even
if we apply Sturgeon's Law literally ("90% of everything is crap")
that's a lot of choice!

Often the best way is to advertise your perplexity on the list and
wait for the answers which are (of course) obvious to others.  But
there must be a way to _reuse_ the discovery process of people who
have gone before!

The search feature on luarocks.org itself seems rather better than the
CLI equivalent, I must say.

steve d.