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On Dec 27, 2006, at 7:50 AM, Roberto Ierusalimschy wrote:


But it is quite a challenge to search and find the
community contributed libraries. I think it would be wonderful if the 
community would select and bless certain libraries as standard. Make
them available for the various platforms compiled and ready to use.


Agree! It could be blessed in the way the the official lua developers
take the lead. Set up a link on front web page (or some where else, very 
visible) "here you find the standard libs we are working on".


How do CPAN work? Do the libraries there have any blessing from the
Benevolent Dictator for Life?

-- Roberto
CPAN libraries don't have BDFL approval. But the standard libraries for Perl, Python, and even Ruby are much larger than that of Lua.
I don't think larger standard libraries are appropriate for Lua, but I do agree with other posters that Lua could benefit from a more standardized mechanism for distributing libraries on the major platforms (Linux, Darwin, Windows, etc.). I've been learning more about gcc, ld, make, etc. than I ever thought I would in simply trying to get lrexlib compiled on my Mac. apt-get on Debian, or fink on Mac, would seem to be good models. It might be nice to have an official effort to clean up the libraries on LuaForge to be compatible with Tecmake, so that they're more cross-platform. For example, I think my problem with lrexlib is that I've been bumping up against a Linux assumption in trying to get it compiled and linked.
I've been tempted to drop Lua in favor of Perl, Ruby or PLT Scheme, but I just "get" Lua so much more easily than I get the other scripting languages. Lua really only needs a little more functionality (regexps, POSIX) for my particular purposes, so I'm willing to learn a little more about the GNU tool set and the differences between compilation on Linux and Darwin to get what I need. Its design is just so much cleaner than Perl, Python, or Ruby (particularly where scoping and closures are concerned), and its syntax is much more readable than that of Scheme. 

Mike