Re: Compiling LUA

[William Pursell <bill.pursell@...>]

Miles Bader wrote:
> William Pursell <bill.pursell@gmail.com> writes:
>> The problem is that the lua makefiles are built with
>> the assumption that the readline library is always
>> available under linux.  This is a packaging error,
>> and should be reported as a bug.
> 
> Given that it's a simple makefile, what do you expect?
> 
> They target a "typical" system (of each type), and if yours is
> different, you edit the makefile..

I expect that the build should work.  If the
makefile maintainer is unwilling to provide
a build that works (and I'm absolutely not
criticizing the decision not to do that work),
then the various PLATS targets should
be removed.

The notion of "edit the makefile to suit your
system" led to a *lot* of headaches in the past,
and the current paradigm is to provide a configure
(or config, or Configure, or whatever) script
that probes the system.  In my opinion, having
PLATS targets to attempt to provide workable
builds on "typical" systems is a mistake.  The
makefile maintainers should either bite the bullet
and autoconfiscate the build, or make 'generic'
should be the default and only target.

Life would be much easier if one could build
the system by passing arguments to a configure
script rather than editing Makefiles and luaconf.h

Again, I am not criticizing the maintainers for
not doing that.  It is a lot of work.  But I
think providing the PLATS targets tend to hide
the fact that that work is being avoided, and
provides the false sense that the build is
portable.


-- 
William Pursell