Re: luadoc installation: enough reading, need revelation

[Hisham <hisham.hm@...>]

On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 4:55 PM, Mark Szpakowski <mszpak@gmail.com> wrote:
> I am trying to install Luadoc (on a CentOS system). Several hours later...
> this is obscure and baffling.
>
> At http://luadoc.luaforge.net/manual.html#installation it says:
> "LuaDoc also depends on two external packages: LuaFileSystem and LuaLogging,
> and you'll need to install them accordingly."
>
> Those in turn require LuaRocks. I have installed all three.
>
> It says: 'The library follows the package model for Lua 5.1, therefore it
> should be "installed".' It's not clear what "installed" (in quotes) means.
> It says "Refer to Compat-5.1 configuration section about how to install it
> properly." I'm running Lua 5.1, so do I need to install Compat-5.1?
>
> It says "The launcher script, namely luadoc.lua for Unix and luadoc.bat for
> Windows, should be installed in your system PATH, so that it can be
> executed. " and "On Unix boxes, the file luadoc.lua could be used as a
> script;". There is no file luadoc.lua. There is a file, in the src
> directory, called luadoc.lua.in, which seems to be the launcher script.
>
> Then I did a "luarocks search luadoc", followed by "luarocks install
> luadoc", which did seem to do something. Eventually I found in my user
> directory the hidden directory, ~/.luarocks/bin, and there an executable
> shell script called luadoc. Going in there and doing ./luadoc --version
> finally returns some success. I suppose I could put that in my PATH... but
> is this really the way to install Luadoc? Or the Lua way?

Well, this is one way to install Luadoc.

LuaFileSystem and LuaLogging (or Luadoc for that matter) don't really
_require_ LuaRocks, but the LuaRocks repository provides packages for
all of them. The default installation of LuaRocks for non-superusers
installs packages under ~/.luarocks, as documented here:

http://luarocks.org/en/Using_LuaRocks

(For instance, if you ran it as superuser, it would install the script
under /usr/local/bin, possibly already in your PATH.)

In any case, thanks for your feedback -- it's always good to see which
steps of the process are not clear for users, in order to improve it.

-- Hisham