Re: Lua Distributions and Package Management

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

On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 1:47 PM, John Hind <john.hind@zen.co.uk> wrote:
> ecosystem. The Community WiKi ought to be the starting point, but you'd be
> hard pressed to find important parts of the ecosystem starting there or to
> navigate what is salient today rather than being of historical interest
> only.

Yes, wikis are not self-organizing.  That's why there was a LuaForge 2
project, to build a catalog with a rating system. It's still a good
idea and I hope Pierre finds some time for it!

> 3. LuaRocks: A non-GUI command-line system. Binary distribution for Windows

This situation should improve now that we have settled on mingw builds
for windows 32/64; we can then populate the repo with all the popular
binary versions and LR can do its dependency magic without needing a
compiler.

> 4. LuaDist: Again strictly command-line. Binary distributions for the three
> major platforms, but these do not include a distribution of Lua itself, only
> the system for handling modules/packages.

Have a look at the 'batteries' distribution on luadist.org.  This is
intended to be the new 'Lua for Windows' but there are also Linux and
OS X builds.

The idea is to put a graphical front-end (using wxLua naturally) so
that a person could install any module that was pure Lua or has been
already compiled - this includes all the major packages.  It's just
been a bit awkward finding out what they are, and this involves
building a manifest of everything, which LD currently lacks.

The wxLua editor is cool, but have a look at Paul K's Zerobrane
Studio, which is the souped-up and generally refined descendent of
that editor, reborn as an IDE.

steve d.