[Sputnik-list] Versium, which repo?

[Enrico Tassi]

On Sat, Dec 29, 2007 at 09:30:29AM -0800, Yuri Takhteyev wrote:
> First, thanks for doing this.  Second, I've been a bit inconsistent
> with Versium up to now, which I hope to fix later.  Basically, versium
> is _supposed_ to have its own svn repository
> (http://code.google.com/p/versium/source), and a version of it indeed
> has been check in there, but it's not the latest version, since there
> is a different one checked into the Sputnik repository
> (http://code.google.com/p/sputnik-wiki/source).  The reason for this
> is that I want Versium to eventually be an independent project, but
> this months I had to fix a lot of small issues in it as I've been
> porting Sputnik to it.

OK, now it is clear I was toying with the wrong version. I still don't
understand why you need to commit the sources of Versium into sputnik
repository to hack on them...

> http://sputnik.freewisdom.org/en/Sputnik_on_Rocks

Yes I decided to play again with sputnik after reading a post linking
that page, but read further

> Given all that, I think the really important question from the point
> of view of Debian packaging would be how to handle LuaRocks based
> applications in Debian.  Perhaps the thing to do would be to start
> this discussion on the luarocks list.

I think LuaRocks can be part of Debian, but I don't think it is a top
priority task, thus my last efforts were to package lpeg, leg and shake.
Maybe I'll work on that in the next few months, but in any case It can
not be used by the Debian package system directly, nor as the main
source of lua software IMO.  Every language I know like Perl and Python
have something similar to LuaRocks, and some modules (the most
widespread) are packaged for the distribution (following strict policies
and giving some sort of insurance, like that the sources of the module
will be available on the distribution ftp servers for some years, not on
a random web page and that what you download from these servers is free
software), while less common modules can be easily installed with the
luarocks/easy-install/cpan whatever. The same holds for versions,
bleeding edge versions can be installed by hand easily, but what you
find in a (stable) distribution should be reasonably tested and only few
(possibly one) versions should be available.

So please, don't make your software unusable without LuaRocks.
While I was toying with sputnik, I just had to remove a require
"luarocks.require" line to make your software load packages from
standard locations. That sounds good for me, and in case a version of
sputnik is packaged for Debian I'll be careful to make all dependencies
satisfied with the right versions.

Just an item in my wish list: In a system wide installation of sputnik,
where at least the core modules (like sputnik, cgilua, versium, wsapi, 
luafilesystem...) are available system wide, is pretty silly to
install the whole Kepler for every wiki that may be run by the computer
(imagine a web server with some virtual hosts on it, or just many ~user/).
I'd really like to have a less intrusive installation script, to just
initialize a directory with the data/ directory and the configuration
files needed by sputnik, like the one doing wsapi.cgi.run(...). 

I can collaborate on that script, if you agree it is a nice thing to have. 

Cheers
-- 
Enrico Tassi