Fwd: LuaRocks, Ease of Use

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

On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 5:55 PM, Henning Diedrich <hd2010@eonblast.com> wrote:
> # pcall/pathes
> * I almost abandoned LuaRocks in the first place for failing to grasp the
> ease of the require pcall tweak.

You mean the require 'luarocks.require'? Otherwise I don't understand
the need for pcall.

> Also, when you come to Lua, the possibly idiosyncratic path system of Lua
> poses a challenge in its own right and that aggravates getting the require
> for Rocks right,

That's true - it's a puzzle at first, where things must go and how
they are looked up.

> # make/compile failure
> * -fPIC or what it was called.

A very common problem - LuaRocks will now always use it on a Unix-like
system[1]. But if LuaRocks is using a makefile, then it is only as
good as the makefile. And writing good portable makefiles is an art
which not everyone masters....

> whatever reasons (NOT for me not trying) I could not find it, could not even
> find the Rocks file itself, as it kept being pasted in tmp and then deleted.

That used to irritate me, then I learned that the thing to do is
'luarocks unpack MOD' , which expands the rock locally, and then go to
the directory and do 'luarocks make' to explicitly build it.

steve d.

[1] for the so-called 'builtin' build type, which allows the source
files to be specified and built in a cross-platform way.