[ANN] Nancy release 671

[Reuben Thomas <rrt@...>]

I'm happy to announce a new release of Nancy, my simple web site builder. 
This version has no new features, but fixes a couple of minor bugs. Get it 
from:

http://rrt.sc3d.org/Software/Nancy

Oh, and it's written in Perl. I thought it might be interesting to say why. 
The problem was not libraries (I used my pure-Lua stdlib and LuaFileSystem), 
but deployment on Windows (I use Linux). I had previously built an 
all-in-one binary for Windows using a cross-compiler. That worked fine but 
made it hard to debug on Windows as I couldn't just edit-run, and also broke 
nastily when the cross-compiler was upgraded. So, I switched to LuaBinaries. 
That enabled me in the end to deploy only pre-built binaries, but at the 
cost of having to install 2 binary packages, and then do manual fiddling to 
get .lua files run as commands by the Windows shell.

ActivePerl does all this for me, and I was already using some Perl scripts 
in the same system, so by rewriting Nancy in Perl I got down to "run the 
Perl installer" as being the prerequisites for running Nancy.

I appreciate the flexibility of LuaBinaries, and if I need to deploy Lua 
cross-platform again, I'm likely to use it. But I appreciate the ease of 
ActivePerl more. If LuaBinaries had a way of building all-in-one installers 
from the components you wanted built using the same framework, it would be 
much more attractive, particularly if it could build MSI files for Windows 
with some of the magic that the ActivePerl installer has. Or maybe just a 
single installer that installs Lua and LuaRocks and then uses LuaRocks to 
install whatever other components are desired.

I won't be announcing future releases of Nancy here, at least, not unless 
they're written in Lua!

--
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