Re: LuaBinaries 5.2.2

On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 5:13 AM, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo <lhf@tecgraf.puc-rio.br> wrote:

> but I guess it is a chicken and egg
> problem: Lua has not been easy to get started with on the Mac platform so
> there are few Mac users in the Lua community.

Really? Does it not build easily in Mac OS X? Of course, you need a
C compiler and Apple these days is making getting one a chore: we need
to register as developer etc, even if you only want the command line
tool chain. A shame, really.

You only need to register an Apple ID to be able to download form App Store on Mac,

It is rather easy since it bundles everything you need to compile an app for Macs.

I've been using Mac for a few years, the only complain I have is Lua is not installed

by default (or comes as part of any bundle), so you always need one more extra

step to make it run in another machine.

Also we have MacPorts, I see no reason why it's "not easy" to install and don't

believe there are "few Mac users" here.

> What we badly need is compatible binary distributions across at least
> the three major platforms (Windows, x86 Linux, OSX)

LuaDist is the current candidate for that.

> Any chance you could put the sources on GitHub or similar so others can
> contribute to this project?

There are no sources, really. My Lua.app uses Platypus, but once built
you can easily change the Lua version and the distriuted binaries just by
changing what is in the folder Lua.app/Contents/Resources, as explained in
http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2013-07/msg00499.html

I do have a Lua.platypus XML file containing the settings to build
Lua.app but these are not portable to a different folder layout and in
any case it is easy to just use Platypus from scratch, using the script
I provide in Lua.app to run Lua, which is trivial:

#!/bin/sh
#DEFAULT=';;'
export PATH=.:$PATH
export LUA_CPATH='lib/?.so'"$DEFAULT"
export LUA_PATH='lib/lua/?.lua'"$DEFAULT"
exec lua -v "$@"

Thanks for your feedback. Like I said when I announced Lua.app, it is a
personal experiment, not meant to be *the* binary distribution for Mac OS X.
I was just pleasantly surprised by how easy Platypus makes it to build a
nice Mac OS X and I had to make one for Lua.
--lhf