Re: Lua Distributions and Package Management

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

On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 12:17 PM, John Hind <john.hind@zen.co.uk> wrote:
> 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!

That's a good point. The LuaRocks built-in backend works like how you
describe; it directly invokes the configured compiler to build
extensions.  (People have LR working quite fine with MSVC).  The
problem is that people usually have a makefile, and so the easiest
route to publishing as a LR rock is to use that makefile.  It's
possible to do reasonably complex builds with the built-in backend,
for instance I once got LuaSocket building like that cross-platform,
but that's an extra bit of effort.

We've been discussing various new kinds of dependencies for rockspecs,
e.g. 'build-time' and 'test-time' dependencies - these are not pulled
in with a binary install.  So the rockspec could specify Lake as a
build-time dependency without making it obligatory for everyone.