Re: Lua Distributions and Package Management

[Paul K <paulclinger@...>]

Hi Peter,

> This is an incorrect install of LuaDist. You are probably running LuaDist using an interpreter that was not installed using LuaDist itself thus it does have information about itself in share/luadist-git/dists directory that stores “dist.info” files about all installed packages, this is very similar to what LuaRocks does with rocks.

You are right about what happened: I ran into issues bootstrapping, so
I just copied the files and ran LuaDist from my own interpreter.

> Therefore the install function decided that it needed to pull in lua also. Note that it also decided to use source code which it does by default but setting lib/lua/dist/dist.config “source” setting to false will disable all build features and pull in only binary modules if available.

It's nice to see that the settings and type/arch can be configured
before requesting the binaries. I still need to figure out where
exactly modules are installed, but so far the possible integration
looks promising. Do you also have binaries for non-Windows platforms?

> Michal Kottman already proposed and partially implemented a module that does exactly this based on LuaDist[1]. This is very much a proof of concept but it shows the possibilities.

Thank you for the link. I saw that and it seems to be very close to
what I have in mind; maybe with some additional parameters to possibly
request installation of modules for a different Lua version.

> I agree that this is an issue. LuaDist “solves” this by using separate install folders for different interpreter versions. This was the most straightforward way to implement it on most platforms without issues. ZBS could simply contain separate subfolders for each interpreter.

I have something very similar (clibs and clibs52 include modules for
different Lua versions), but there are still some shared folders and
having one lualib may require a bit of trickery on Windows.

Paul.