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On 20/01/2020 11:19, Pierre Chapuis wrote:

There have been a lot of attempts to solve that issue in the past.



Yep! And yet sadly none really worked out.


The "blessed subset of libraries" never worked for many reasons.

Kepler Project worked for a while, but died for lack of funding.
Was there ever a project officially "blessed" by Lua Team? Was Kepler project actually "blessed"? I think it was already dead when I joined lua-l so I can't remember. 



At some point I created Lua Toolbox [1] to at least have some kind
of ranking of the most used gems in the community. The main feature
was the ability to explicitly endorse some rocks, so that you could
find out the most endorsed rock for a given category. It was kind of
merged into LuaRocks but I feel like it isn't really usable anymore.

There was also a plan to create a Lua Foundation to deal with those
issues, but it went nowhere...



I missed that attempt on lua-l (was it before Kepler went down?).
Anyway that would be the right thing to do, if Lua team agreed and participated with their blessing and initial guidance.
BTW, a well organized foundation, with formal endorsement, could have some advantage at collecting funds to foster the projects and guarantee their long term support.
The complete lack of policy, which is a stake of Lua development, doesn't really sit well when projects becomes huge and global. 


Eventually I think what proved to work best so far is the Lua
distributions approach, where someone curates a list of libraries
and maintains a coherent whole, separate from upstream projects
like Linux distributions do.
Sadly this won't solve the basic problem: an unified, cross-platform (Windows included) set of libraries whose behavior is the same on all systems (bar system-specific subsets). 

For that some kind of "mandated/blessed" API specifications would be needed.
I'm not proposing some sort of "design by committee" approach, but there is some middle ground between that and "everyone rolls their own" current approach.
But again, with no formal endorsement from Lua team, every effort will die off quickly. As it has done at least an half dozen times in the past. 



[1] https://lua-toolbox.com