Re: Lua Distributions and Package Management

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

On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 8:39 AM, Philipp Janda <siffiejoe@gmx.net> wrote:
> another one. What we need (IMHO) is a script (as portable and easy to
> install as possible) that uses the information in a rockspec and the meta
> build tool embedded in LuaRocks, and spits out a directory hierarchy of dlls
> and lua files suitable for manual installation/embedding/packaging.

That sounds very doable.  Key concept is 'portable and easy'.
Especially if we restrict ourselves to the built-in backend -
unfortunately, there are all these damn makefiles (which Peter rightly
identifies as useless for cross-platform) whereas I suspect the
majority of them could be replaced by built-in rules.  However, that's
a lot of rockspecs to hijack - remember they all have maintainers.

> If you can convince most Lua developers to use Lake instead of autotools,
> make, cmake, shell scripts, and/or <insert obscure tool here>: Bravo, that
> will make things easier!

I don't hold out much hope, really.  I personally find it very useful,
of course, but it's unlkely to get any traction.  But we have the
output of these tools...a little installer is not that complicated.

Scaling of LuaDist?  Well, through heroic effort Peter has grown it
(much of his work is reverse-engineering the build rules and turning
them into CMake files).

steve d.