[ANNOUNCE] LuaAddons and LibrariesAndBindings overhauled

[Reuben Thomas <rrt@...>]

I woke up in a masochistic mood this morning, and happened to look at the
LuaAddons page almost first thing. Noticing that there were still a lot of
Lua 4 addons on the main page, I thought it was high time to declare Lua 4
dead and move all the stuff onto the archive page.

I ended up doing the same for LibrariesAndBindings. In the process, I had
to check many links, as the version number of Lua wasn't given. I have
added guidance to LuaAddons to say that the version number of Lua should
always be added to aid future archiving, and I've added all the version
numbers that were missing. Some I had to guess by date of last release, as
the software page didn't even mention it (and I couldn't be bothered to
download all the software).

I also removed some links that are comprehensively dead (i.e. I've known
them personally to have been dead for years), and others that were
inappropriate (e.g. should be on lua.org/uses.html, not LuaAddons).

I also subdivided the part of the LuaAddonsArchive that archives libraries
and bindings to be the same as LibrariesAndBindings. This should make
future archiving quicker.

Finally, I made sure that all of LHF's libraries and tools were added as
appropriate.

I think the results are a vast improvement. In particular, it's now much
more obvious exactly what is available for Lua 5 (and in some cases,
what's not: we only seem to have two GUI toolkits left: wxWindows and
IUP).

The one remaining fly in the ointment is that I suspect there are still
quite a lot of active Lua 4 users (and not nearly so many 3.x and
earlier). It might be good therefore to separate out the Lua 4 stuff from
the earlier stuff and have separate archive pages (the archive pages are
also getting rather long). If anyone wants to do this, it won't take very
long, as every single item is now clearly version marked.

I end with a suggestion to the Lua team. When trying to work out what was
going on with one or two libraries like poslib (and also noticing that a
couple, like the Lua 3.2 library pmatch, have disappeared completely), I
mused on the fact that there's a lot of useful code (particularly by LHF)
which isn't as well known as it deserves to be; often it only seems to
come to light by someone asking "is there a library to do x?" on the list.
I've tried to rectify this by not only adding all LHF's libraries and
tools to the Wiki but also making the links point to the relevant web page
rather than directly to the tarball, so that for the price of one extra
click users also get a quick look at everything else he's written.

My suggestion is that the Lua team distribute their code from the Wiki
rather than from PUC-Rio. It would take less effort (a single place, a
single mechanism for uploading files and editing pages) and would make
their valuable work much more accessible. At the moment it seems rather
hidden, and different versions of various libraries are lying around at
different places (with confusingly similar URLs) on the puc-rio.br server.

-- 
http://www.mupsych.org/~rrt/
poetry, n.  the art of squeezing blood into a stone