RE: Lua Encyclopedia

["Andy Stark" <astark@...>]

Right then...

I have been away from my desk for a couple of hours, due to my
action-packed job, but to answer a few questions:-

- I don't really understand what Peter Hill means by "a Lua data format".
Lua code that prints out the documentary text? A code module that puts the
text into Lua tables which you can then use in your own program? A data
format that I am unaware of which is known to be highly accessible to Lua
code? If you are in any doubt, XML data can be transformed into almost any
kind of text (via XSLT), so it would be possible to generate Lua code from
the raw data if necessary. And also PDF, HTML, Man pages (I think...) I'm
not sure I understand where you are coming from on this one.

- I don't think the ALARM would have its home on the wiki. The idea is not
primarily that people can just add arbitrary comments to each entry like
"yeah, this one was really helpful" or whatever. It would be rather like
the Lua source code is at the moment: centrally maintained, but open to
suggestions and contributions of code. The source XML and stylesheets for
the ALARM should be downloadable, but the whole thing should also be
available as PDF, HTML, etc. An HTML version should probably be made
available on a website, and it would not be a bad thing for this to be on
the wiki, but I don't think this should be the main development mechanism.
(And in case you were getting angry, I know people actually post
intelligent comments on wikis as well, not just "yeah, that one was really
helpful" :-) The docs for Apache projects are created in a similar way,
but are not in encyclopedia form as far as I know.

Anyway, I think the reaction is basically positive, so I will see what I
can do over the weekend.

Thanks for your interest,
&.