Re: Mixing different versions of Lua

[Reuben Thomas <rrt@...>]

On 27 February 2011 00:20, Rob Kendrick <rjek@rjek.com> wrote:
>
> Quite.  If Zile and its dependancies weren't using autoconf, it would
> have probably been easier to build, and I'd be using it now to write
> this email.  As it is, I'm not, and I've given up trying to build it.

Which version of Zile? The lua branch is currently unreleased
pre-alpha code whose build system is in rather dodgy shape, and I'd
discourage anyone from spending time on it; I'm working hard to get it
releasable.

The C version on the other hand is reguarly built on dozens of OSes
(largely thanks to Nelson Beebe), and I take its portability very
seriously; the only OS I've had a report of its not building on is
DOS, and that came down to a lack of will to fix it between the
automake maintainers and the bug reporter. (It does work with a small
patch, which was enough for the reporter.)

I'm not aware of any build system which gets close to GNU autotools
for portability (it has no external dependencies for the user), but
I'm happy to learn about alternatives, especially for the Lua version
of Zile, whose build system is obviously much simpler.

I should just make it clear that I'm talking about building from
release tarballs; I'm not so interested in the ease of building from
git (but there too it's pretty easy, and I've had no reports of
failures).

So, if it's broken, please report bugs!

> I've used
> UNIXes where autoconf doesn't work [and this ends up meaning you don't
> have the energy to get it going at all],

So, please report bugs! (Again, Nelson Beebe's work on building Zile
has resulted in a couple of autoconf/automake bug reports, but most of
the bugs he found were non-portable code I'd written.)

> pkg-config should work on
> any POSIX system just like Lua does :)

Indeed, but with a dependency chain to which I'm unwilling to expose
Zile. The Lua version already has too many dependencies, and I want to
reduce them.

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