Toward finding consensus on the Lua Kepler Project (redux), a work in progress.
Report issues for Lua4Windows batteries: https://github.com/LuaDist/batteries
Mailing lists:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!forum/luaforwindows
luadist@googlegroups.com
This project came to be as a renewed effort to create a Lua distribution for Windows, but has since evolved in a broader effort as a cross platform distribution of a complete Lua kit, including Lua itself, common modules, tools and documentation.
This project mostly contains the overall alignment of many existing projects and tools. These tools and projects remain on their own and remain the property of their respective owners and creators.
All material in this project is licensed under MIT license terms, which is the most common license in the Lua ecosystem. See LICENSE.md.
Anything contributed to the project will also be assumed to be under the MIT license unless explicitly stated otherwise.
NOTE: The above mentioned licenses only apply to this project, not to any of the included components, tools or documentation. Please consult their respective (contributing) licenses for more information.
See the project charter document
See the Lua modules document
See the Tools document
See the documentation document
TODO: Add history of LFW.
The Kepler project is the melding of several prior Lua programming language projects: [i] the former Kepler Project; [ii] the Kepler Project's outgrowth, the LuaForge Project; [iii] the [Lua for Windows Project](https://code.google.com/p/luaforwindows/\); and [iv] a host of individual executables and Lua modules developed by a multitude of Lua community members.
In accord with the meaning of Lua in Portuguese ("the Moon"), the original Lua Kepler Project drew its name from Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), the founder of celestial mechanics. See Johannes Kepler: His Life, His Laws and Times.
Here is a lightly edited history of the former Kepler and LuaForge projects by one of its remaining contributors, Hisham H. Muhammad:
The former Kepler Project was envisioned by André Carregal as a research project to make Lua a viable language for web development, in the sense that things like PHP and Ruby are nowadays viable, ie, having the tools so that a coder can concentrate on their app rather than reinventing wheels. So yeah, that goal included a good deal of the "batteries" as well as figuring out distribution issues.
A major part of this project, also, was to bring together people who were working seperately in pieces of this puzzle, including the politics to cooperate with pre-Kepler projects such as CGILua, LuaSocket and LuaBinaries. This also included getting funding -- Carregal spent a lot of time working to get government grants for the research project (which was officially a project involving PUC-Rio and the company he worked on as well).
People like Fabio and myself (both grad students under Roberto at the time) were funded by this project to work on Lua modules. LuaRocks was created because of Kepler, and I was paid to work on it for two years. LuaForge was also created and its maintenance funded by Kepler. Eventually, we didn't get a grant renewal, plus the overall landscape wasn't much in Kepler's favor (it never took off as a killer app for Lua), and the project mostly died off.
Some of us "inherited" the modules we worked on and remained on them as volunteer side-projects, working on our free time. I kept LuaRocks, Fabio kept Orbit and others, and so on. Note that this includes stuff that I perceive as key infrastructure such as LuaFileSystem. Fabio takes care of its github repo, and released version 1.6.2 about 6 months ago.
André Carregal, on the other hand, effectively left the project (and I really can't blame him for the burnout, after all the effort he went through -- he's an unsung hero of the Lua ecosystem (or perhaps "sung", since Yuri's book, which I heartily recommend for insights on the story)). The project was reshaped not as a platform that made "releases" but as a general hub for all those subprojects (the availability of LuaRocks helped to diminished the reliance on one big tarball).
The LuaForge shutdown was probably the major effect of the project's twilight. Carregal tried as best as he could to keep the service going, but without funding to hire someone to babysit GForge (and the growing expectations of the Lua userbase), keeping it up with regular shortages wasn't an option. He tried handing over LuaForge to "the community", but as most of us remember, lots and lots of discussion went on, but nothing as concrete as the old LuaForge ever emerged.