Re: LuaRocks search aid, anyone?

[Russell Haley <russ.haley@...>]

On Sun, Feb 26, 2017 at 12:47 AM, steve donovan
<steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
I love LuaRocks. It makes me feel like a kid in a candy store.

As someone self taught in Unix I come across dead ends in what I'm
trying to do all the time. Trying to cram more into a command line
tool just makes it more complicated and doesn't solve anything for the
beginner. The fastest solution now is a secondary search on the web. I
found LuaForge before LuaRocks and liked it better for searching. On
FreeBSD, freshports.org is a great example because as powerful and
awesome as pkg is, the easiest fastest way to find and search
information is always a web browser. pkg has groups that fresports
respects and freshports also links through to websites and sources and
build information. But, when hunting for some weird unixy package,
groups don't always help.

So that said, once I got used to the LuaRocks website it was good. I
do think the luarocks website could be much friendlier to the
uninitiated. Look at all the text on the main page and ask yourself
this: would some kid trying to learn Lua to script his favorite video
game have any idea what luarocks provdes him? From a non-lua-fluent
perspective, I don't think there is very much readable text on there
quite honestly. I also think the link to view all modules is too small
and even an arbitrary grouping would help someone get started.

Thinking out loud about improving the utility of the website:
- A list of common tasks to solve in lua and the packages that could be used.
- Perhaps some way to link the luarocks website to the readme of the
package? That would eliminate work for the authors too.The system
could automagically pull the github or sourceforge revisions? I happen
to know a spiffy http package that could be used. :)
(https://luarocks.org/modules/daurnimator/http)
- Like Github, uploading or exposing Luadocs should also be encourage
I think. I wonder if there is a way to export keywords from luadocs to
be searchable?
- I don't like the idea of voting or weighting, but perhaps authors
could be allowed to publish "packages I use" lists?
- Authors could be encouraged to post code examples that could rotated
on the website?

I also wonder out loud about the state of integration between the
lua-users-wiki and luarocks?

Cheers,
Russ