> and that date option on usepackage has been used almost never, and for
> lua it's probably less useful as  unlike a package which is
> latex-specific code, for luatex you may want to require "off-the-shelf"
> lua code that is not specifically written for luatex, so you need to be
> able handle code that is not using the module interface defined there.
> It is a relatively large chunk of the code for something that can only
> be an optional possibly-nice-to-have feature, so to me at present it
> feels like something that should be in a package not in the core.
> However some kind of identification banner printing is probably useful
> in the kernel, so we could easily be convinced otherwise...

You're right about the global module requiring stuff, it's not that
useful. But two things are very useful: the banner (as you said) and the
error/warning/log function. LaTeX does this for tex packages, having a
similar interface to output package-specific errors from lua is very
useful, I use it quite extensively... But it could be in a separate
ltluamessages.dtx if not in the kernel...

> Other features though can easily tolerate different interface designs
> in different packages (which is why the contributed latex packages are
> so varied in general, not just for luatex) so some things can be left to
> luatexbase, but the exact place to make the cut isn't fixed yet.

Ok, the more features in the kernel the better for me!

Thank you,
-- 
Elie