Re: The source file culture

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

2009/9/8 Michal Kolodziejczyk <miko@wp.pl>:
> So I would say it is a Microsoft (and also Apple) culture which prevents
> you from easily compiling any available source code.

Well, Unix culture is code-based, and when balancing the needs of
developers and users, tends to make life easier for developers.

The average Windows/Mac user is scared of command-line tools, and I
include many intelligent engineers and scientists in this category; it
isn't a sign of lack of intelligence; they just have different
piorities.  Cygwin is not a solution to a problem they recognize ;) So
I have sympathy for Lua programmers who find that C makes their head
hurt.

Although, man, does Microsoft make compiling more difficult than it
need be!  The decision to have a compiler-specific runtime and
deprecate good old mscvrt.dll makes for life of headaches.  (Mingw can
actually build against the new runtimes, but not always.)

Anyway, at least the MS tools are now free, for the nominal cost of a
few hundred megabytes of download.

For the end user/scripter, errors are a bug.  Something like LuaRocks
can handle the Lua dependencies well, but there are packages which
have 'special' needs. For example, lgdm can be built for Windows, but
you have to go out and hunt for the GDM port first. So the real
challenge is to make something like LuaRocks understand how to get and
install those external dependencies.  This is really non-trivial, if
you think of all the varieties of platforms, rpm,deb,darwin-ports,
etc. Imagine a module specification which specified all the many
possible ways to grab things, and you can see that the module author
(or maintainer) has to be an unusually dedicated person!

On the subject of 'binaries considered harmful': you need trusted
sources, and some check like MD5 (which LuaRocks does support). We are
not talking about picking up DLLs from some random shareware site!

steve d.