Re: [Lua vs Python] Luarocks

[Eduardo Ochs <eduardoochs@...>]

Hi Dennis!

Let me disagree! =)

Debian has this:

  https://packages.debian.org/sid/python-apt

I've never been able to use it - my brain is wired in a way that makes
Python too hard for me - but I have the impression that if luarocks
could be made a bit more hackeable then the people who are complaining
that Lua's batteries are a mess would change their attitude
completely... they would change the tone of their messages and they
would start sending things like "hey, I wrote this script here that
performs the tests such and such in the latest version of all the
existing rocks, and I just discovered that 20% of them fail this test
here..."

By the way, the last line of /usr/bin/luarocks is:

  command_line.run_command(...)

I've just added these two lines before that one,

  local myfile = os.getenv "LUAROCKS_DO"
  if myfile and myfile ~= "" then dofile(myfile) end


and I am starting to play with that. My first (super-trivial) tests
are here:

  http://angg.twu.net/LUA/luarocks-extra.lua.html

Cheers,
  Eduardo Ochs
  http://angg.twu.net/dednat6.html
  http://angg.twu.net/emacsconf2019.html
  http://angg.twu.net/#eev


On Sun, 19 Jan 2020 at 07:52, Dennis Fischer <darkwiiplayer@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> While I've had my fair share of problems with luarocks, mostly because I
> did some weird things and swapped around Lua installations a bit,
> overall I really like the way it works. Anyone who frequently uses Ruby
> might know this thing called bundler, which makes sure that an
> application runs with a specific version of a gem (gem = rock, but for
> ruby), and it's quite a pain to work with compared with Luarocks, where
> you can just have a local rock tree in your project and a rockfile that
> installs the dependancies locally.
>
> More than Luarocks being broken, it often seems to me that many rocks
> are just broken and nobody notices, be it because the author doesn't
> even use Luarocks or that it's just a personal project turned rock
> because why not and nobody cares if the version that's on the internet
> doesn't work as long as there's some quick hack to get it working when
> needed.
>
> There could be many solutions for this problem; but all of them would
> require rock authors to spend more time on things that aren't actually
> code and that seems like something the average rock author doesn't want
> to be bothered with, like setting up CI/CD on github or even just
> manually checking that a given project state installs cleanly on a new
> system (VM, container, etc.).
>
> Well, those are my thoughts at least :)
>
> On 19/01/2020 01:47, Eduardo Ochs wrote:
> > Hi list,
> >
> > here are my 2 cents about the Lua vs Python discussion - in a new
> > thread.
> >
> >
> > 1) It is unrealistic to ask Roberto and Luiz to choose among rocks
> >    that they've never used and bless some of them. Some people use
> >    luarocks very little or not at all, and Roberto and Luiz may be
> >    some of these people.
> >
> >
> > 2) At this moment it is not very easy to play with a new rock - and it
> >    should be!!! Let me give an example. A few days ago I realized that
> >    I could find a certain bug easily if I had a debugger - I do have
> >    functions that start REPLs and inspect stack frames, but they are
> >    quick hacks that I wrote myself and they're not very good, so I
> >    went to luarocks.org and got this listing:
> >
> >      https://luarocks.org/search?q=debug
> >
> >    I chose "debugger", and did:
> >
> >      luarocks --local install debugger
> >
> >    and discovered that now I have these files:
> >
> >      ~/.luarocks/lib/luarocks/rocks/debugger/scm-1/doc/README.md
> >      ~/.luarocks/share/lua/5.1/debugger.lua
> >
> >    which is great - this one comes with docs, I don't need to fetch
> >    the source package! - so I did this,
> >
> >      lua5.1
> >      userocks()   -- defined in my LUA_INIT file
> >      require "debugger"
> >      -- ...I and got this error:
> >      --   stdin:1: module 'debugger' not found: [blabla many lines]
> >
> >    Voila! Another rock that doesn't work out of the box for me...
> >
> >
> > 3) A few days ago I complained that "luarocks unpack" does not work on
> >    my Debian box. My messages are here:
> >
> >      http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2020-01/msg00099.html
> >      http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2020-01/msg00101.html
> >      http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2020-01/msg00114.html
> >
> >
> > In an ideal world the problem that I reported in (3) would be
> > considered EXTREMELY URGENT - *everybody* would know that the first
> > step towards getting 25 millions of Lua users is to have impeccable
> > batteries, and the first step towards that is to make luarocks both
> > super user-friendly and super hacker-friendly... trying a rock should
> > be something incredibly easy for all kinds of people, including people
> > who want to look at the source!!!
> >
> > WE NEED AN ARMY OF LUAROCKS HACKERS.
> >
> > Cheers,
> >   Eduardo Ochs
> >   http://angg.twu.net/dednat6.html
> >   http://angg.twu.net/emacsconf2019.html
> >   http://angg.twu.net/#eev
> >
>