Re: [ANN] LuaBinaries

[Mike Pall <mikelu-0504@...>]

Hi,

Daniel Silverstone wrote:
> These days my packaging work on Lua is all but static. I would not be
> against someone taking the packages over from me and re-doing them to be
> better for Lua.

Sorry, my posting was not meant to discourage you or your efforts.
It is meant as a hint for distribution maintainers in general to
improve the quality of Lua packages.

> I simply don't have any time to invest the effort to
> correctly repackage them without risking damaging the installability or
> buildability of the packages which depend on it.

I guess it doesn't make sense to sort this out for Lua 5.0.
The problem is not isolated to Debian, anyway.

However for Lua 5.1 we should try to give clear advice for
distribution maintainers. I'll try to distill a Wiki page
when this discussion has ended conclusively.

> Ultimately I personally believe that the shared library form of Lua is
> worthwhile for the bugfix potential.

[Roberto answered that while I was still typing. See his posting.]

Having both a static executable and a shared library does not seem
so farfetched. Perl does it. We can do it, too.

> The zLib shared library is not that
> big either and the benefits of it being a shared library severely
> outweighed the performance issues when it had a security flaw.

[I can see your argumentation, but zlib is a not a good example:
 The core loop is written in x86 assembler and doesn't suffer
 from -fPIC. But this is OT.]

> *BUT* as
> I said above, I'm not utterly wedded to the packages and if someone else
> feels they can do better by the community and better by Debian through
> redoing the packaging work then I invite them to do so.

Sorry, I'm running Gentoo or I'd volunteer. Please do not feel
turned away just because of this discussion. We all share the same
goal after all (improve the experience of Lua for everyone).

Bye,
     Mike