Re: LuaRocks with Windows/Visual Studio

[David Manura <dm.lua@...>]

Mark Meijer writes:
> - The lua-discount installation appears to demonstrate a bug in one of
> the LuaRocks sourcefiles.

The "deps.lua:428: attempt to concatenate global 'plat' (a nil value)" is a
known bug.  There's a patch (not yet applied to the mainline):

  http://lists.luaforge.net/pipermail/luarocks-developers/2008-August/000838.html

> - The stdlib installation fails because its only dependency fails
> (lrexlib-pcre)...it appears that the pcre lib is used exactly once,

Perl's Module::Build differentiates between "requires" and "recommends" types of
dependencies:

 
http://search.cpan.org/~kwilliams/Module-Build-0.2808/lib/Module/Build/Authoring.pod#PREREQUISITES
  http://module-build.sourceforge.net/META-spec.html#requires

Regardless if LuaRocks were to support that type of thing, I agree that stdlib
should be installable without this hard dependency.  Another option would be to
split stdlib into two packages, one of which would be optional and contain the
pcre-dependent code.

> I am considering stepping away from Visual
> Studio for my day-to-day needs (I'm sick and tired of the
> compatibility problems). If anyone has any suggestions or
> considerations regarding what my next choice of compiler might be (for
> use on windows), I'm all ears. I'm not too keen on cygwin, but MinGW
> seems like a good choice.

It depends what type of compatibility you're looking for.  Cygwin provides the
most UNIX-y environment in Windows, though still not fully compatible with Linux
sources.  MinGW/MSYS is more native.  Going further in that direction, you can
run cl.exe inside Cygwin or MinGW/MSYS (e.g. via GNU make).  Note that Cygwin's
package manager currently installs gcc 3.4, although you can compile gcc 4.x
yourself if that is desired.