[Lua vs Python] Luarocks

[Eduardo Ochs <eduardoochs@...>]

Hi list,

here are my 2 cents about the Lua vs Python discussion - in a new
thread.


1) It is unrealistic to ask Roberto and Luiz to choose among rocks
   that they've never used and bless some of them. Some people use
   luarocks very little or not at all, and Roberto and Luiz may be
   some of these people.


2) At this moment it is not very easy to play with a new rock - and it
   should be!!! Let me give an example. A few days ago I realized that
   I could find a certain bug easily if I had a debugger - I do have
   functions that start REPLs and inspect stack frames, but they are
   quick hacks that I wrote myself and they're not very good, so I
   went to luarocks.org and got this listing:

     https://luarocks.org/search?q=debug

   I chose "debugger", and did:

     luarocks --local install debugger

   and discovered that now I have these files:

     ~/.luarocks/lib/luarocks/rocks/debugger/scm-1/doc/README.md
     ~/.luarocks/share/lua/5.1/debugger.lua

   which is great - this one comes with docs, I don't need to fetch
   the source package! - so I did this,

     lua5.1
     userocks()   -- defined in my LUA_INIT file
     require "debugger"
     -- ...I and got this error:
     --   stdin:1: module 'debugger' not found: [blabla many lines]

   Voila! Another rock that doesn't work out of the box for me...


3) A few days ago I complained that "luarocks unpack" does not work on
   my Debian box. My messages are here:

     http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2020-01/msg00099.html
     http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2020-01/msg00101.html
     http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2020-01/msg00114.html


In an ideal world the problem that I reported in (3) would be
considered EXTREMELY URGENT - *everybody* would know that the first
step towards getting 25 millions of Lua users is to have impeccable
batteries, and the first step towards that is to make luarocks both
super user-friendly and super hacker-friendly... trying a rock should
be something incredibly easy for all kinds of people, including people
who want to look at the source!!!

WE NEED AN ARMY OF LUAROCKS HACKERS.

Cheers,
  Eduardo Ochs
  http://angg.twu.net/dednat6.html
  http://angg.twu.net/emacsconf2019.html
  http://angg.twu.net/#eev