[ANNOUNCE] Lua 5.0 RPMs for Linux/x86 updated

[Reuben Thomas <rrt@...>]

Another minor update to my Lua RPMs, which are built on RH9, but are
static, so should work on pretty much any system that can run x86 Linux
binaries.

This time, the change does improve functionality: I noticed that the Lua
distribution comes with readline and history functionality for systems
that support it, so I enabled it. I hadn't noticed before because I
usually run Lua inside Emacs...

In case anyone is wondering what all the fuss is about, this is a vanilla
Lua 5.0 build for Linux/x86, but thanks to the excellent customisability
of the Lua sources, and some judicious "sample" code added by the Lua
authors, it's more vanilla choc chip, i.e. on Linux you can get dynamic
library (loadlib) support, history and readline support in the standalone
Lua interpreter, and various other goodies, just by judicious use of extra
defines when building.

I used to use a customised build of Lua 4, mainly so I could add extra C
libraries, but the combination of loadlib and the LUA_INIT environment
variable (which I use to do "dofile ~/.luarc") means that C libraries can
be loaded automatically every time you run the interpreter (as can Lua
libraries) making it possible to use a completely "virgin" Lua build and
still have all your favourite extensions available every time you run
lua.

So unlike when I used to offer Lua 4 RPMs, this time you can be confident
that I'm actually using what I'm shipping!

I currently don't ship RPMs with dynamic libraries, as they crash on
RedHat 9, and neither I nor the Lua team can work out exactly why or whose
fault it is. But if anyone does want to build dynamic RPMs, I've just
updated my spec file to have all the same tweaks as the static build.

Get all the goodies (static RPM, static and dynamic spec files) from:

http://www.mupsych.org/~rrt/Lua

-- 
http://www.mupsych.org/~rrt/ | What you don't know controls you