Re: [ANNOUNCE] LuaAddons and LibrariesAndBindings overhauled

["D Burgess" <db@...>]

In note that lua2c is marked as lua5 methinks it is
still lua4, which begs the question whether lhf might
one day do a lua 5 version?

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>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