Re: [ANNOUNCE] Lua 4.1 (work4)

["yphilho" <pl-mlnl@...>]

(Answering via groups.yahoo.com, since I seems to miss the latest 
messages. Mmm, it is just slow, I received Daniel's response to the 
original message of John before the first message of this thread...)

--- In lua-l@y..., ramsdell@l... (John D. Ramsdell) wrote:
> Daniel Silverstone <dsilvers@d...> writes:
> 
> > Lua /is/ easy to install, perhaps not for people who don't know 
what they're
> > doing when they install software which isn't pre-packaged, but 
then again,
> > is that such a bad thing?
> 
> This is false.  Lua is not easy to install.  For autoconfig'ed
> systems, one simply types:
> 
> $ ./configure
> $ make
> $ make install
> 
> There are no instructions to read, and the process can be automated.
> This is what it means for software to be easily installed.

As you say: "For autoconfig'ed systems". I am no specialist, but I 
think that for systems that doesn't have /bin/sh (Windows, perhaps 
others like BeOS or MacOS), it doesn't work.
And from what I see in the libraries I downloaded (eg. cURL, 
ImageMagick, PCRE), configure files sum up to hundred of KBs! For 
ImageMagick, configure file alone = 420KB! That's quite big for such 
a result.

> The current Lua install method requires that one edit it's makefile.
> The makefile has it's own conventions that are different from every
> other package.  It's a waste of time to ask programmers to go 
through
> this process.
> 
> Autoconf solved this problem a long time ago.  It's well tested
> software that is accepted by the community.  There is a reason so 
many
> people use it.
> 
> John

Well, the makefile of Lua is quite stable, so why don't you create 
and distribute separately an autoconf package for Lua? It makes a 
double download, but at least it won't bloat the official 
distribution for those which don't need/cannot use these files.

Regards.