[Feature!] Use rocks instead of luarocks

[mrcjkb]

• We've hit a dead end with luarocks regarding parallel builds:
  • [Perf] Parallel sync and update #413
• Many users have issues installing or bootstrapping luarocks (mostly on non-Linux systems).
• It has subtle bugs and development/releases are very slow.

So we've decided to shift our focus to bringing rocks up to feature parity with luarocks.
When we have implemented enough for the purpose of managing Neovim plugins, rocks.nvim will switch to rocks instead of luarocks.

This will be a major breaking change that requires a reinstall of rocks.nvim.
But if it goes according to plan, a cleanup+ :Rocks sync will be enough.
Perhaps we can even implement a :Rocks migrate command to automate the upgrade process.

[simifalaye]

@mrcjkb How far is rocks away from meeting the minimum requirements to replace luarocks in rocks.nvim? Is it after the rocks add feature or are there still other features and bugs that are yet to come?

[mrcjkb]

@mrcjkb How far is rocks away from meeting the minimum requirements to replace luarocks in rocks.nvim? Is it after the rocks add feature or are there still other features and bugs that are yet to come?

It's hard to tell at this point. We're getting pretty close to an MVP.
If you look at the pattern match on cli.command in rocks-bin's main module, you can see which commands we've implemented (although some of them need some polishing).
One thing I want to tackle soon is to implement a fallback to luarocks for features we haven't implemented yet (for example using custom build backends).

We could probably create a branch for this issue soon, and publish an scm version to luarocks.org.

[brianhuster]

It will be great if it allows declaring Git dependencies (in addition to Rocks dependencies)

[mrcjkb]

It will be great if it allows declaring Git dependencies (in addition to Rocks dependencies)

For the MVP, we probably won't be extending the Rockspec format.
If you're a package maintainer who needs to depend on a git dependency, you can always create an scm Rockspec for the git dependency.

For users, we do plan on adding support for installing packages directly from git (without the need for a rockspec/luarocks package).