Re: [mildly OT] Some info about Python

[Oliver <oschmidt-mailinglists@...>]

On 01.02.20 23:14, Sean Conner wrote:
> It was thus said that the Great Andrew Starks once stated:
>> The benefit of a standard library, independent/separated from Lua and it’s
>> development, is clear to me. It’s an idea that has been had before, but
>> why is it so hard to make it happen?
>   Someone has to do the work (I'm trying, and doing it publically on this

IMHO the essential key is not the missing "The Standard Library", that everyone
agrees on, it is more the infrastructure around this, i.e. the infrastructure
that would make it easy to collaborate  and to build a feeling of a
collaborating community and to build some sort of agreed usefull standard
libraries that are considered useful by experienced Lua users. And if this would
lead to  more than one flavour of standard library, even with overlapping scope,
this is not the problem. The problem is more that there is currently  relatively
little kind of community collaboration on working on the goal to built up a Lua
code repository useful for newcomers and common use cases. Everyone cooks his
own soup that perfectly fits his use case. This is perfectly OK IMHO, this is
not a "bad thing", but everyone who wants Lua to have more community impact sees
that there is something missing in the current way.

What we have today:
1.) lua mailing list
2.) lua community wiki
3.) luarocks

Luarocks despite all of its drawbacks is the best thing we currently have: one
central registry for lua projects. There is even the possibility to structure
the projects using tags. However not all important projects are listed on
Luarocks. I can understand if someone is not happy with Luarocks, since it has
many principle problems and causes a lot of headcache and is not easy to adjust
to specicific needs (at least for me).

IMHO it is *not* important, that a single top authority instance gives blessing
on "The Standard Library", it is more a problem that the infrastructure for the
community to go in any concordant or whatsoever direction is not around in a
conveniant way. What could this be? One possibility could be to extend Luarocks
site's capabilities. This would mean to improve the ranking system (giving
stars) and to make it visible. We would also need not only a star system for
projects but also issue discussion lists per project to make it visible what
drawbacks and what benefits each projects have. With this it could lead to a way
to develop a community agreed standard on how to a project should be structured
and what minimal requirements a project shoud fulfull to become community
endorsed. It would be a lot of work to extend the Luarocks website. Another
possibility could be to use some existing collaboration platform, e.g. github,
and build something collaboration infrastructure with this platform, e.g.
creating a github "Lua Community" organization to manage a list of community
endorsed Lua projects (independant from Luarocks) and to use issues/pull
requests for disscusion and improvements about which project should be endorse
and whatsoever.

Anyway: someone has to take the reins and to create something that makes it
possible to develop the community, i.e. the problem is not to develop code, the
problem is to develop some infrastructure that leads the Lua community to "the
next level".

Best regards,
Oliver