Re: A major problem with the Lua ecosystem

[Dibyendu Majumdar <mobile@...>]

On 1 February 2018 at 08:22, Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2018-02-01 0:08 GMT+02:00 Dibyendu Majumdar <mobile@majumdar.org.uk>:
>> On 31 January 2018 at 22:03, Paul K <paul@zerobrane.com> wrote:
>>>> require "paths"
>>>> paths.require "libtorch"
>>>
>>>> The paths.lua script is generated from:
>>>> https://github.com/torch/torch7/blob/master/paths.lua.in
>>>> I must be missing something here.
>>>
>>> I think it's a different paths module. I'd expect it to be this one:
>>> https://github.com/torch/paths
>>>
>>
>> Ah okay thanks! Strange that there is 'paths.lua' in the Lua script folder.
>
> The problem has two parts:
>
> 1. The name of the module is often a common word like "paths"
> which may easily be non-unique.
> 2. The name under which the module is contributed to LuaRocks
> is not the same as the name that comes in "require".
>
> The Lua team has done what they could: "require" can specify
> subpaths, which so far seem mostly to be exploited by writers
> of large module collections.
>
> What we as a community shoud do is to agree on a standard
> directory tree to act as containers. just one or two levels.
> Then we can say "paths = require 'torch.paths'" and make
> sure we get the right one.
>

I didn't even realize that Lua supported require 'a.b.c' and that this
is translated to a filesystem path, maybe because I haven't seen it
being used.

Will certainly make sure that all modules in the Ravi distro follow a
supplier.modue (e.g. torch.paths) pattern - can't imagine why people
don't do this. It is a no brainer to me.

Regards
Dibyendu