RE: Makefile vs LUA_PATH inconsistency

[Thijs Schreijer <thijs@...>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: lua-l-bounces@lists.lua.org [mailto:lua-l-bounces@lists.lua.org] On
> Behalf Of David Heiko Kolf
> Sent: vrijdag 16 mei 2014 18:06
> To: Lua mailing list
> Subject: Re: Makefile vs LUA_PATH inconsistency
> 
> Thijs Schreijer wrote:
> > When building Lua using MinGW, the following structure is produced;
> >
> > {root}
> >   +-- bin
> >   +-- include
> >   +-- lib
> >   |    +-- lua
> >   |         +-- 5.2
> >   +-- man
> >   |    +-- man1
> >   +-- share
> >        +-- lua
> >             +-- 5.2
> 
> Did you run "make install"? I just skimmed through the Makefile and it
> looks to me like "make install" wouldn't make a lot of sense on Windows.

Windows perfectly handles this structure, no problem. It's just that the defaults for the paths do not work. 
Adding to the defaults LUA_PATH="!/../share/lua/5.2/?.lua;!/../share/lua/5.2/?/init.lua" (similar to Peters remarks) would simply align the paths with the makefile.

It's easy to fix (when you know what you're doing), but it doesn't work out of the box. And as Andrew mentioned; what good are defaults if they don't work?

> 
> When I am building Lua on Windows I just run "make mingw" and that
> usually works out of the box for me -- all the libraries are looked for
> relative to the host application (which I copy manually instead of using
> "make install").
> 
> "make mingw" to me just means to use MinGW to build the generally usable
> Windows DLL and EXE, not to build a configuration specially tailored to
> MSYS where those paths might be relevant.

All too easy when you know what you're doing. But remembering my own Lua start, I picked up Lua for Windows tried some compilers and LuaRocks, but couldn't for the life of me get it to work. Just because of all these little nitty gritty details I had to set manually. I dropped it for 2 years then came back and finally got it going.

I don't see why it should be so hard for newbies, if also the defaults could be fixed to just work.

Thijs

PS. Besides the above, the Windows + VS build is still the only platform where Lua by default is build _without_ the COMPATALL option (in 'luavs.bat'), which is also pretty useless as a default. Would be nice to fix that too...