Re: Lua for Windows needs help

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

On Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 6:04 AM, Stuart P. Bentley <stuart@testtrack4.com> wrote:
> For the library collection, make a "meta-package" rockspec that installs all
> these packages (skipping them if not available for the current platform, eg.
> LuaCOM on anything but Windows).

That sounds like an excellent idea - rockspecs can have per-platform
overrides so that such a meta-package would only pull in LuaCOM on
Windows, etc.

> On other operating systems you can use the native package installer for Lua
> and LuaRocks, install the SciTE Lua debugging configuration however (PPA,
> RPM, AUR, tarball...), and then run the same luarocks install as on Windows.

Yes, generally it would be preferable to get SciTE from the native
package installer, but I'm pretty sure that LuaRocks can deliver the
debugging extensions with a little ingenuity, which would get around
the need for native packages for it.

As for OS X, which is famously SciTE-free (unless you have the GTK
runtime) there is also lua-gdb as an option for Emacs. (This utility
gives a gdb-like interface to the Lua debugger, plus allowing stepping
into C extension code. If the mimicry was good enough, it might work
for other IDEs that use gdb behind the scenes.)

> As far as I can tell, the main problem with this currently is that some of
> the libraries in LfW don't have rocks (such as IUP... hint ;))

Yes, the big boys (especially the GUI frameworks) are tricky to
package cleanly. Well worth the effort, however.

steve d.