Re: PiL 1

[Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@...>]

> Furthermore, please do not open access to PiL 2 when PiL 3 would be published.

Just for correction: we did not open the access to PiL 1 when we
published PiL 2. It went free online a few months after we published it
(see http://www.lua.org/news.html), years before PiL 2. It did hurt the
sales of the printed version, so we decided not to open the access to
the second edition.

The book gives us more than pocket money (although not enough for a 50
foot yacht yet). In fact, buying books is a very good way to contribute
to the project. So, currently we have no plans to put newer editions
free online.

Alexander has reasons for his complain. Many people arrive at the book
through Google, frequently landing right on a particular page. No amount
of warning in the main page will help. And the outdated information may
be a real source of noise.  For instance, some time ago we had to add a
warning on a page (http://www.lua.org/pil/24.1.html), after too many
complains that "a first example" did not work.

To remove PiL 1 from the site seems a too radical "solution", but I
think we could do something about this problem. One solution would
be to add warnings about deprecated features (like the one about
luaL_openlibs). That seems a lot of work. Another would be to add a
generic warning (maybe with a link to the "Incompatibilities" section of
the manual and adds for the second edition ;) at the top of every page.

-- Roberto