While pandocpm sort of work, there's still some major changes needed. The new lua filtering system in pandoc 2.0 certainly sparks my interest in completing this tool again. e.g. we had excuses to not have our own package manager because we can rely on those existed in the language we wrote it. But since pandoc embedded the lua interpreter, the only thing needed for a lua filter is really only the filter itself (so in this case relying on some sort of lua package manager doesn't make sense). Now there's still one imperfection though, that pandocpm is written in Python. Do you think it is possible to rewrite pandocpm in lua, using only the embedded lua interpreter alone? I haven't used lua at all, but I heard that in lua there's minimal "standard library" so I'm not sure how much functionality has been embedded. From some examples you and @jgm did, there's already IO. And then pandoc certainly handles YAML (but is there YAML library available in the embedded lua interpreter? That might make it easier.) And then pandocpm only need to access the DATADIR, and I imagine it could be done to let pandoc passes it to the script?