RLPM - The Roblox Lua Package Manager

About

RLPM, the Roblox Lua Package Manager, is an application that aims to foster code reuse and library distribution on the Roblox platform. It does this by providing both a deployable server which can be queried for "packages", and a corresponding client that runs in the user's Roblox Studio.

Goals / Synposis

As a disclaimer, the last I've been seriously involved in Roblox was many years ago, but after asking some people it seems like the situation is essentially the same as it was back then.

RLPM aims to solve the code reuse problem that plagues project development on the Roblox platform. From my own experience in both creating things, observing others create things, asking people I know who create things, and occasionally looking around the Scripting Helpers forum, I've found that, 1) essentially every developer or development studio rolls its own code, and 2) many problems being encountered by developers and development studios are duplicates, leading to each studio having its own unique solution to a common problem.

Point #1 is responsible for a huge amount of time that is wasted duplicating work -- time that a developer or development studio could otherwise be spending developing what makes their project actually interesting and what is actually visible to the end-user. In other words: the stuff that actually matters.

Point #2 is responsible for a more wide-reaching problem: because every developer or development studio rolls their own solutions to common problems and does not publish their advancements, an environment is created where everyone is essentially trying to re-invent the wheel. Collaboration is important to solving complex problems: when programmers who each specialize in the production of certain procedures combine their efforts, a product is formed that is far greater than what could have been produced by any of the individual programmers on their own.

Game development teams understand this, but their libraries are limited to the small microcosm of that team and people who work with it, where they are prone to rot away and stagnate after the developers decide to move on. In the real world, someone or a group of people who found that project to be useful would have continued on the work, but in Robox no such culture exists.

The solution

An assumption that this project makes is that the reason for these problems is because of the following issues having to do with code reuse on Roblox, and if we can resolve as many of these as is possible, then a healthy culture of code sharing and reuse should follow:

1. Quality control: Due to the prevalence of "viruses", developers are justifiably anxious to use things made by other people. A centralized, peer-reviewed authority from which developers can reliably retrieve quality code would solve this issue.
2. Ease of updates: There is no way to see if an asset that is inserted from Free Models has been updated without going to that asset's page and checking. As a package manager, RLPM will aim to make updating easy, with the rolling back of packages being a goal for the future.
3. A general distrust of "open source" assets: This is a harder problem to solve. This issue is rooted in both issue #2 and a general attitude of elitism fostered by the Roblox developer community. I hope that, with the support of reputable developers, RLPM will be able to demonstrate that sustainable development communities can be made possible on Roblox.
4. Developer habits: As many Roblox developers are first-time programmers, there is a tendency to not follow good practices for modularity and code reuse. I hope that, if RLPM becomes popular, it can bring visibility to this problem and possibly even solve it just by virtue of being there as a tool that programmers can use.

Whether we can be successful at fixing code reuse on Roblox remains to be seen, but it's sure worth a try, at least in my opinion.

Roadmap

TODO

Contributing

As I no longer have convenient access to a computer that can run Roblox Studio, the RLPM client application will probably start to rely on those who do as time goes on. If you're interested, shoot me a direct message @ecilicica. Thank you!