Re: [ANN] Lake - another Lua-based Build Tool

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

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 8:15 PM, Geoff Leyland
<geoff_leyland@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> (You had "/com")

Moral of story: wait for the morning to post ...

I think 2140 lines is a bit big for a single Lua script, especially
one so weakly typed  ;)

Yes, rake is elegant and focussed - it could be useful to extract the
dependency-driven programming thing, and maybe the support libraries.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/882764/embedding-rake-in-a-c-app-or-is-there-a-lake-for-lua

A cool thing would be to use Lua Lanes (if available), so one can
really take multi-threaded advantage of dependencies not needing to be
fired in strict order.   It would then be relatively straightforward
to drive multiple cores efficiently, like make -j does.

Also, I'm intrigued by the idea of generalizing the model, allowing it
to be more 'reactive'.  That is, watching a filesystem and if anything
changes, running the appropriate rules.  Or generalizing the concept
of inputs, and allow them to be anything which has a time-stamp.

As for LuaRocks - that already does a fair amount of tool-abstraction
with the builtin build type:

http://luarocks.org/en/Creating_a_rock

I would see lake as being complementary.  I'll make it available as a
rock, and so rocks with semi-awkward build steps can pull it in as a
prerequisite, and then the build could be as simple as

build = {
  type = 'command',
  command = 'lake'
  ...
}

steve d.