Re: The impact of a module's license on the requiring Lua

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 10:58 PM, Jay Carlson <nop@nop.com> wrote:
> I'll agree that debian-legal is a better place to discuss why. However,
> *distributing* the combination of readline and Lua requires care, especially
> if statically linked.

Yes, a brief search of the internets revealed some very strong
opinions on the matter; it all reads like theological discussion to
me.

Well, I have 'routed around the damage' by providing linenoise as a
statically-linkable BSD equivalent (adds less than 10KB) so that there
is a 'safe' option, which has the advantage of removing a somewhat
unstable dynamic dependency for standalone executables. (That phrase
is used in the technical sense, BTW; I have no beef against the GPL
and have used it myself)

LGPL is just going to be too complicated for such a project to manage...

> Similarly, hooks to cat out resources from the exe are nice to have, but
> maybe it should be configurable. I have no idea.

It could be very useful. I have a use case, a little personal web
server called Orbiter which needs to embed resources like CSS and
javascript.  The usual, LuaRocks-friendly strategy is to bundle text
resources as Lua modules - Yuri takes this to its elegant extreme with
Sputnik; he even embeds icons like this.[1]  But a clever tool could
do that for a person.

steve d.

[1] Windows executables have resources, which can be anything. No
doubt there is some equivalent out there for Unix.