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(This is aimed at the "community edition" thread too.)
On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 6:45 PM, Patrick Rapin <toupie300@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I hoped that the 5.2 -E interpreter option would be backported to 5.1.5. Any
>> chance of getting that?
>
> Most certainly none.
Lately it seems like many people are quite certain about things they have no control of. I think "very unlikely, based on policy and precedent" is about as far as anybody could say, except for two people.
Anyway, there's a significant Lua fork with a bunch of users; it does not use version numbers like 5.1.5. In addition the Debian fork has made changes like this in the past.
On Unix systems, a wrapper script
#!/bin/sh
# in case you wanted to put them back later or something
old_LUA_INIT="$LUA_INIT"
old_LUA_PATH="$LUA_PATH"
old_LUA_CPATH="$LUA_CPATH"
export old_LUA_INIT old_LUA_PATH old_LUA_CPATH
unset LUA_PATH LUA_INIT LUA_CPATH
exec lua "$@"
will *almost* have the same effect, and the cost is near zero.
Oh, you're on Windows.
> If you want -E on 5.1, you can backport it yourself for your usage.
Well, if you think it would significantly help on Windows you may want to have a word with Antonio Scuri, who's listed as the owner of record of the LuaBinaries project for Win32. Or talk to the Lua For Windows committers. I think a patch with some tests would help.
> But asking for this official change is utopia...
I think the reason there isn't even a common basic library (at this point "standard library" is a poisonous term) is there is not sufficient leadership interested in it. What I mean by leadership is:
"I'll listen to this person/these people because I trust them to make good decisions, and I know many other people do too. And they have working code."
It feels like learned helplessness to just say "upstream isn't going to do it, so it's hopeless." I think repeated statements *from* upstream approve of branches (as long as it's not marked to confuse people.)
Official isn't the last word. A long time ago Linus's kernels were official and standard and everybody shipped them, but that hasn't been true for ages; every significant Linux distro ships their own kernels. In my opinion it's been good for mainline. Lack of any forking (for various reasons) can be near fatal, oddly; see egcs, Emacs 19, glibc--although those were arguably just the very visible symptoms, not the problem itself.
Jay