Re: Lua Distributions and Package Management

["John Hind" <john.hind@...>]

Regarding procedural versus declarative make, the tradeoffs are different
for development and for installation. Sure a development system gets an
advantage from only having to repeat steps whose inputs have changed and
from re-ordering steps to run concurrently. I want to let my IDE handle this
and not bother me with details like makefiles, but the command line
masochists are welcome to their little pleasures!

However installation from source has different tradeoffs. It is not
iterative: it is a straight forward procedure with a known starting point.
Assumptions should be tested before the procedure starts and each step
should be verified before moving on to the next. If possible, the tools
required should be included in the installer package, used and discarded.
Installation is a one-off procedure and it is more important that it is
reliable and automated than that it is as fast as possible. I'd rather spend
10 minutes staring at a progress bar than half a day trying to debug a
makefile!