Re: Proposal: smartlua

[Peter Drahoš <drahosp@...>]

On 6 Mar, 2013, at 14:32 , Andrew Starks <andrew.starks@trms.com> wrote:

> Homebrew is a really good model for this. It's the one system like it
> that makes me smile. I find myself forgetting that I have it,
> installing something from "./configure & make install" and then
> removing it, so that I can do it in Homebrew, instead.

Homebrew is excellent but it has the advantage to be confined to only one platform and requires a compiler chain to be present. In fact LuaDist is essentially the same but multi-platform, however to do this it relies on CMake to smooth out the differences in compilers and naming conventions of libraries (I also hate reinventing the wheel). However the primary problem people see is the dependency on a C compiler and if we do replicate something like Homebrew we will need a C compiler present. However LuaDist and to certain degree LuaRocks can operate in mixed source-binary mode that requires no dependencies which is preferable for Windows users.

In short, if you want Homebrew for Lua be prepared to also have a C compiler available on the system. Then there is only a small step to use a single build system and you end up essentially with LuaDist.

pd