On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 1:40 AM, Hisham <[email protected]> wrote:
> Yes, I agree. But I've never arbitrated over namespace issues. And in
> fact, from what we've discussed in the MoonRocks threads, the apparent
> tendency was to move to an even more hands-off approach,

Totally - you would have to be a benevolent dictator, which would
interfere with the goal of getting as much into the repos as possible.

> The first idea that occurs to me is to write a document with
> guidelines/best practices.

Yes, a lua-wiki page would be a useful collaborative start.  Lua
developers are like cats, and see policies as an attempt to turn them
into dogs ;)   As a commenter in a recent lambda-the-ultimate thread
about the importance of library management, "it's a social problem,
and if I was more social I would do something about it".  CPAN is
usually given as an example of a successful attempt to enforce
namespacing, but it works because everyone agrees on the principle.

Any set of guidelines will have exceptions:

1)  a project should use one distinct top-level package.  In
particular, avoid clashing with an existing project's namespace.

 -But luasocket defines the less-than-elegant module ltn12 on the
top-level, which is a standalone helper
 -sometimes it makes sense to add to an existing namespace - e.g
LuaExpatUtils adds lxp.doc.

2) don't abuse the standard Lua library tables (basically (1) again).
   - However, it's a temptation and I've done that in my youth!
   - there could be community-agreed extensions available to standard
tables like os where the semantics are in agreement - e.g. os.sleep
which is _usually_ implementable and should provide time in fractional
seconds.

So really there's only one principle.  It would be helpful if LR had
the means to dump out all existing modules, but I understand that's
awkward with the current repo structure.  A repo scraper would not be
difficult on the server side, and then maybe make the output available
on luarocks.org?  Not a technical solution to a social problem, but a
tool to help people find a gap.

steve d.

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