Re: LuaBatteries.org ?

[David Manura <dm.lua@...>]

On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 8:05 PM, Duncan Cross <duncan.cross@gmail.com> wrote:
> ...but what I think could have a strong
> positive effect is if we had more of a culture of critical peer-review
> around modules, and more of a sense that as module creators we are
> working towards something collectively rather than all working in our
> own silos.

The Perl module authors mail list [1] serves a very similar purpose.
It's a location for module authors to cooperate and request feedback
(RFC) from other module authors on their work.  Typical discussions
there include module naming, packaging, and
design/documentation/testing best practices.  Perl also has other
mailing lists [2] for CPAN and peer review in terms of the CPAN
testing service [3], cpants.perl.org.

Is there justification for Lua likewise having a separate mail list
for Lua module authors?  We do have the LuaRocks mail list, but that
has been very specific to LuaRocks and rockspec submissions, excluding
more general, and arguably more important, module authoring
discussions like Linux packaging, API design, testing, documentation,
module maintenance, building (e.c. CMake),
LuaForWindows/Batteries/Binaries, and LuaForge2.  We also have lua-l,
but that may best remain focused on the Lua language proper and major
announcements, especially as it moves to lua.org.  For some recent
discussions like LuaForge2 and the shellscript API, users have felt
the need to take the discussion off the lua-l, lacking a more specific
list.  OTOH, for this proposal to make sense we would need to avoid a
situation where everyone feels the need to subscribe to both lists
with lots of cross-talk.

Criticism of Lua modules has come up often enough (batteries/CPAN),
and enough people have expressed interest in the quality of the Lua
module ecosystem (e.g. LuaForge2), that maybe something needs changed
structurally--i.e. getting people interesting in module development on
the same list and more regularly communicating on this topic, other
topics excluded.

[1] http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.module-authors/
[2] http://lists.perl.org/all.html
[3] http://lists.perl.org/tag/qa.html