[ANN] LuaForge Phase I

["Andre Carregal" <carregal@...>]

Fábrica Digital would like to announce the launching of LuaForge Phase I and
to invite everyone in the community to register their projects at
http://www.luaforge.net

LuaForge is a free service to the Lua community that can be used to fully
host Lua projects and as a catalog of Lua projects. Projects can be open
source or commercial, or can be hosted anywhere else and still register
themselves at LuaForge.

The LuaForge implementation has been separated in three phases, evolving
along the improvements in bandwidth and CPU allocated to the site.

Phase I - "the catalog"
In this phase LuaForge can be viewed as a centralized Lua project catalog.
The current bandwidth limitation should be no concern for catalog and
project browsing.

Phase II - "the mirror"
In this phase LuaForge will have enough bandwidth to serve as mirror for any
project that so wishes.

Phase III - "the forge"
In this phase LuaForge will be stable enough to be used as host of any Lua
project that wants to be there.

Although the site is currently fully operational, we do not endorse the use
of LuaForge Phase I for the release of big files or for any critical
information. CVS is enabled but we suggest using it at your discretion.

Our plan is not to compete with SourceForge or other repositories, although
we will be using LuaForge as the repository of Kepler Project modules. It
simply made no sense to not offer the opportunity of a categorized catalog
for the community.

LuaForge's trove (the project tree) will serve as a complement to lua.org
"uses page" and to the lua-users wiki. What we want is to have an easy way
to find related Lua projects, but we need the collaboration of everyone
registering their projects. Think of it as a Lua  Yellow Pages.

Please keep in mind that you do not need to move your project to LuaForge
(in fact during phase I this is would not be a good choice), you just have
to register it there with a brief description. LuaForge allows the
classification of your project in various categories and the more complete
the catalog gets, the more everyone will get from it.

We already have projects in LuaForge using every tool there and some using
only the classification facilities and a pointer to their external home.
Feel free to choose which model is best for your project.

Commercial projects interested in registering can feel free to use the
catalog and point their "project home page" to the company site for example.
Project administrators can disable every feature not wanted and leave only a
project description.

LuaForge was implemented using GForge (http://www.gforge.org), "an Open
Source collaborative software development tool, which allows you to organize
and manage any number of software development projects."

Thanks for everyone involved in the setup phase and apologies for the long
mail.

Andre Carregal
www.fabricadigital.com.br