Re: roadmap for Lua

["Hisham Muhammad" <hisham.hm@...>]

On Jan 3, 2008 9:49 AM, steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> wrote:
> So what do other 'third tier' roadmaps look like? Anybody got
> something interesting in the garage that's coming out this year?

Joining in the roadmaps thread:

Well, LuaRocks is now out of the garage, and it keeps improving
constantly, mostly due to the community's feedback, which has been not
a lot really (compared to the number of module authors out there) but
has been pretty positive. So I really hope that this is the year when
our dream of building up a consistent universe of Lua modules will
come to fruition (one has to dream big, right? :-) ).

At this point, the rockspec format (rules files used by LuaRocks to
build/install modules) is still evolving, mostly to accomodate the
needs of various modules: some have Makefiles, some don't, some
makefiles don't have an "install" rule, some makefiles hardcode
"-shared" to build libraries (which doesn't work on, e.g., OSX, while
the actual code usually builds fine), etc. Currently, I'm making
LuaRocks jump through these hoops, but hopefully over time module
authors will take LuaRocks into consideration and will write more
rocks-friendly makefiles (I told you I dream big!).

My plan is to have LuaRocks 1.0 released by the middle of the year,
with a "rockspec 1.0" format specification (in time to celebrate the
solution of Lua's long-standing "2nd tier" problem at the Lua Workshop
;-) ), and to keep releasing 0.x releases about once a month until
then. There is no formal guarantee that the format will remain
backward compatible during 0.x though -- if needed, we'll break it to
provide the best 1.0 possible. But I am being careful with the format
so that I didn't have to break backward compatibility of rockspecs so
far (but forward compatibility is not being kept). This means we
didn't have to drop any rocks so far (while some did get revisions, it
was not because of LuaRocks compatibility). The idea is to encourage
people to contribute rocks to the repository even in 0.x stage, so we
reach 1.0 with a sizeable repo.

Once we reach 1.0, the idea is to keep backward and forward
compatibility through the 1.x series, but my crystal ball does not go
beyond that. :)

-- Hisham