Re: lua40 and Debian

["John Belmonte" <john@...>]

On Feb 15, 2008 12:10 PM, Enrico Tassi <gareuselesinge@libero.it> wrote:
> Debian GNU/Linux currently ships lua40, lua5.0 and lua5.1
> Since we are approaching a Debian release, our release managers are trying
> to cleanup the pool of packages from unused ones. No Debian package is
> depending on Lua version 4.0, but maybe there are users of that version
> out there...

I think this is fine if there are no dependencies, but bowing to the
release managers here sets a bad precedent.  Don't be surprised in the
future when they want to kill 5.0 and 5.1 after newer versions of Lua
become available, and put pressure on perfectly working applications
to "migrate".

The Lua library is unique in terms of how stable each release is, how
apps can embed it and become bound to a certain version indefinitely,
and how there are significant incompatibilites between even point
versions.   I tried to explain this in the Debian README.  Distro
managers want to fit everything into a box-- Lua's odd shape might
have them pulling out their chainsaws.

--John