Re: Proposal: smartlua

[Peter Drahoš <drahosp@...>]

On 7 Mar, 2013, at 8:54 , steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 2:34 PM, Peter Drahoš <drahosp@gmail.com> wrote:
> ...
> On the subject of programs-as-zip-archives,  this is the approach
> favoured by Love, I believe (sorry can't type the umlaut ;))

Creating single executables is limited mostly by external dependencies. Licensing on some dependencies does not allow for static linking to the library and therefore forces the project to use multiple files, at least app.exe and library.dll files need to be distributed. Sure, some modules are not burdened down by this issue but in general there are far too many useful modules that are. Distributing multiple files using zip archives makes sense in that context. Another issue is packing of application data that projects using smart lua would use .. again resulting in multiple files.

In my opinion concentrating on packing everything into single executable is secondary. The primary motivation for smartlua should be ease of use with high degree of automation and minimal pain for the user. Considering this, at least on Windows, it would be much more practical to simply distribute the binary components needed and provide a convenient way to distribute and pack applications based on it into a installer. LuaDist already does fill this role as you can simply pack the deployment directory with your application and copy it to a new machine (that is binary compatible).

pd