Re: Lua for Windows needs help

[Peter Drahoš <drahosp@...>]

On Mar 2, 2011, at 2:52 PM, RJP Computing wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Lua for Windows has been a great project, but the team thinks that it has reached as far as it can in it's current state. The problem is that Visual C++ 2005 is old and comes with very complicated deployment. Because of this Lua for Windows is looking for a way to build all the included modules from source. Now that has never been the goal of LfW, so we just take released binaries and include them. We would like to keep the focus in this area and ask for more help from the Lua community.
> 
> We are looking for people willing to help test, build and bring packages into a package system.
> 
> We need to discuss (which can be offline) what is the best approach to get the "the Holy Grail of 'build the world!'" for Lua for Windows. Once this is achieved, even partially we can start building a small limited Lua for Windows package based on this new approach.
Join the cause at [1]. And yes, I still think at the moment migrating projects to CMake solves most of the issues (independently of platform/IDE/compiler) but its no "Holy Grail".

> Things to still figure out:
>   * What are the most important modules for the stripped down version of LfW?
Lua, luasocket, luafilesystem - is the absolute minimum required.

>   * Should Lua and LuaJIT v2.x be included?
Yes, if possible older variants of both too.

>   * Which packaging system should be used? LuaDist (http://sourceforge.net/projects/luadist/) for building and LuaRocks (http://luarocks.org/) for adding new libraries to users installs?
>   * Is LuaDist still alive and active? I goto http://luadist.org and the website is just a place holder. Can someone in the project comment?
LuaDist is still active. Most of the team is busy with other tasks at the moment but I'm sure we could create a build for LfW fairly quickly (MinGW+CMake) as most of the modules are already available. There are issues with the automated deployment utility but building the modules manually or tailoring a build script specific for LfW requirements is possible. The Bootstrap[2] process we use for setting up the automated deployment of modules is basically it but with minimum selection of required modules.

Please note that LuaDist itself lacks maintainers and could use the collaboration. We have recently moved the project to GitHub[3] and are missing the project page. However Wiki content and all dist were successfully moved.

>   * Can this be made to be cross-platform? (I hope so, that is a personal goal)
Yes, LuaDist does this (OS X, Linux/Unix, Windows) but there are issues in more complex modules. Again we could use more feedback and maintainers.

pd

[1] https://github.com/LuaDist 
[2] https://github.com/LuaDist/Bootstrap Bootstrap Process (installs Lua, luasocket ...)
[3] https://github.com/LuaDist/Repository Available Modules