Re: Proposal: smartlua

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

On Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 8:08 AM, marbux <marbux@gmail.com> wrote:
> Me too. I'm already brain-dead so am eminently qualified. :-)

You are too modest, sir!  I find that I am also 'intermittently smart'
and overdependent on Google.  Still cannot write a rockspec from
scratch without having to sit with the docs and a few examples for a
while - like Makefiles, rockspecs tend to be copied from examples ;)

So the question would be: what would be the preferred workflow?  The
way I imagine it going is that a person has a nice Lua program and
wishes to deploy it on multiple machines and hand it out to chums.  A
'smart' Lua would  analyze the dependencies and pull the required libs
into an archive (it would just be a zip file with a manifest, like a
.jar file).  That would be the 'executable.' and it would be by design
completely self-contained.  It could get fairly large (e.g. a wxLua
application would have the wxWidgets DLLs) but convenience always
comes at a price.

As for implementation, it would work off the 'Lua Batteries'
distribution that Peter generates as a base, but could pull in other
libraries that were installed by other means (e.g. LuaRocks).   There
would need to be some sophisticated stuff happening behind the scenes
of course, but that would be largely hidden.

steve d.