[ANN] ldeb a Debian packager for Lua scripts

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

Hi all,

This is another tool dedicated to solving the same problem as
luabuild: how to package and deploy non-trivial Lua applications.
luabuild uses soar and srlua to make standalone executables; ldeb [1]
uses soar to pack local dependencies into an archive, and find global
dependencies, which will be matched against a manually-compiled list
of Lua modules in Debian [2], and make a .deb that packages the
standalone script with the appropriate Debian dependencies.

It's an entertaining time to be using Lua on Debian, with the new
stable release coming up, and so there will be extra packages
available by the end of the year, for Lua 5.2 as well. However, this
does not invalidate the approach taken here. It isn't very
_scientific_ and does not (yet) come near to Debian standards, but it
does the job.

A fair question would be 'Why not just use LuaRocks?';[4]  ldeb is
intended for making applications available in as direct a way as
possible, using the modules available in the Debian/Ubuntu
repositories.  It does not package libraries (or binaries), but will
generally be easier for deployment to non-expert users precisely
because these modules are available as precompiled binaries.

It leans heavily on soar; the version here has some improvements over
the version included in luabuild.

steve d.

[1] https://github.com/stevedonovan/ldeb
[2] https://gist.github.com/2634438
[3] http://stevedonovan.github.com/files/ldeb1.0.deb
[4] it would not be difficult to make it generate rockspecs, by
generating a correspondence between modules and LuaRocks packages.