Re: Best practices on writing rockspecs for uncommon libraries

[Peter Odding <peter@...>]

>> As far as I'm concerned, native dependencies not managed by luarocks are the
>> host system's problem. lua-zmq requires libzmq, how you get it is your
>> problem.
> 
> Although it would be very cool if a rockspec could specify how to get
> the external dependencies on a per-platform basis:
> 
> package = {
>   name = 'zmg',
>   native = {
>     ['apt-get'] = 'zmg0',
>     yum = 'zmg',
>     macports = 'zmg',
>    -- and so on
>   }
> }

I'd love something like this because the Lua/APR binding depends on
several external libraries that are available as Debian and Ubuntu
packages yet the best I can do right now is to list these libraries in
"external_dependencies".

At the moment rockspecs can't even hint to the user how external
dependencies can be installed on their systems, e.g. a message defined
in the rockspec which is shown to the user when the install fails. Even
just that would be a big improvement :-)

If Hisham is not opposed to the idea I might look into adding support
for something like this to LuaRocks because I would consider it a big
improvement in user friendliness. Of course one can argue whether this
isn't out of scope for a Lua packages manager...

 - Peter Odding