New Community Infrastructure

wiki

• We lack infrastructure to support Lua's community: LuaForge and Lua-users
• We are not showing the best face of Lua: simple, extensible, easy to learn
• We, as community members, are not meeting frequently, nor physically
• We are not doing *something* to make Lua's community as good as the software (we = those you would like to help, me included)
• Blah, Blah, Blah

SOLUTIONS

• Short term plan
  • LuaForge v1.1: read-only, patched, just-works, we are working in something better, version of the current one
  • Brand new lua-users wiki, it's done in Perl?! I claim for something like: http://www.wikidot.com/learnmore:community is free(hosting, software, support!) and looks pretty
  • Calendar(on-line whiteboard) of Lua events: Camps, Conferences, Workshops, Trainings, Meetups.
  • => Your Idea Here <=

• Middle term plan
  • [LuaForge v2.0]: [join here]
    • A Forge where one can work on one's projects using Git, Mercurial, SVN, have a ticket system, a wiki, etc (see: http://www.indefero.net) --BertrandMansion
    • A Library of Lua libraries where one can download .zip/.tgz and browse libraries by category --BertrandMansion
    • A HUB of Lua projects, hosted anywhere(trusted sites like: github, gitorious?, sourceforge, etc.) --DevelCuy
  • [someproject].luaforge.net ... do we really need it? please see http://drupal.org/project/og :)
  • Lua-users Wiki v2.0: Home made, for showing the world that we eat our own dog food for useful stuff
    • I'm thinking [Sputnik] would be a good choice (see ThisWikiImplementation). --RobHoelz
    • [uWiki] is pure Lua wiki implementation -- Suggested by @cehteh on #lua
  • LuaConference?/Summit, something big, to show the world the real size of community!
  • Official(in the whole meaning of this term) Mailing lists: xxxx@lists.lua.org
  • => Your Idea Here <=

GOOD NEWS

*We* can do it! you don't have to be a "the smartest hacker", just decide to help, now!

• solution (you would like to support) | Your name
• LuaForge | StuartPBentley
• LuaWiki | Fernando P García (DevelCuy)

[2009-10-08 01:43] RobHoelz and DevelCuy (me) are so much interested(want to put hands on) about doing this, can we "officially" start a project to improve lua-users wiki? Is there some code online we can work on?

Rather than have it auto-aggregate from a number of varied sources, however, I think a better plan would be to have it act as a lightweight hub, which would be used as a single point from which to track where the homepage is hosted, what repositories (LuaDist, LuaRocks, deb-pkg, Synaptic, SourceForge, Launchpad, LuaForge itself if package hosting is supported going forward, etc.) it is distributed/mirrored on and which (if any) is the development focus "main" host. Registration would be automated for both users and projects.

It would be primarily used, like the current site, as a destination for discovery of applications and libraries that use Lua, categorized by type (application/game with Lua support, Lua library/module/package, Power Patch, set of Lua scripts), then by field (games, sound, graphics - the same tree LuaForge already has (although there might be a different tree for power patches)). Projects could either be registered by the project's manager/developer, with homepage hosting provided and editing allowed only for them ("hub page" style), or by anybody who knows about the project, editable by anyone and owned by no one, but claimable by the project manager at any time after creation ("wiki entry" style).

It would also be useful if it provided homepage hosting for Lua projects (like the current version's <project>.luaforge.net sites), since many of the alternative hubs that have been suggested for code hosting and the like do not provide this service (really, everybody but Sourceforge). The biggest thing LuaForge could non-redundantly provide (assuming this would be possible) would be Kepler Lua Page support in project sites. This could be complemented with a page for adding files for the most common project page setups (such as Sputnik or a set of Lua scripts that generates pages that look like the Kepler manuals whose style 90% of LuaForge projects copy). Hosting Lua Pages would also provide a convenient avenue for library projects to provide a live demo.

As stated though, bug tracking and source control are best handled by many other sites that make this their sole purpose.

I think a good model to work from would be Launchpad (http://launchpad.net). Once you've registered for an account, you can create a page for your project simply by following a link and choosing a long name and a Unix name for it, at which point you enter your details (project homepage, where the packages are, where the source is, where the bug tracking is), with opt-in choices for each of the details for services that Launchpad provides. --StuartPBentley