Re: Standardizing lua names on *nix systems (and their distributions)

[Andrew Starks <andrew.starks@...>]

On Wednesday, February 4, 2015, Hisham <h@hisham.hm> wrote:
> On 1 February 2015 at 22:35, Pierre Chapuis <catwell@archlinux.us> wrote:
> >> If you are packaging Lua for a *nix distribution, please share your
> >> naming schema so that we can find a common ground.
> >
> > I am not the packager but here is what Arch Linux does for binaries:
> >
> > /usr/bin/lua (this is 5.2)
> > /usr/bin/lua5.1
> > /usr/bin/luajit -> luajit-2.0.3
> > /usr/bin/luajit-2.0.3
> > /usr/bin/luarocks -> luarocks-5.2
> > /usr/bin/luarocks-5.1
> > /usr/bin/luarocks-5.2
> >
> > and for pkgconfig:
> >
> > /usr/lib/pkgconfig/lua.pc
> > /usr/lib/pkgconfig/lua5.1.pc
> > /usr/lib/pkgconfig/luajit.pc
> >
> > In my opinion they should do the same thing for Lua that they
> > already do for LuaRocks and LuaJIT, which is use the 5.2 suffix
> > and have /usr/bin/lua be a symlink to /usr/bin/lua5.2.
>
> As a side note to this observation, the default installation from
> source of LuaRocks does this out-of-the-box, naming the main script
> `luarocks-5.x` and making `luarocks` an unversioned symlink.
>
> Maybe it would be a good idea to try to find email contacts of some
> major packagers? (I guess Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Arch would cover a
> good part of the Linux space (since also many distros, Ubuntu
> included, are based on some of those), plus Homebrew for OSX).
>
> -- Hisham

When I develop for Lua, it's always in a sandbox and sandboxes seem to be a use case that is an afterthought, or was, when I tried to use LuaRocks in Windows. This may have changed.

However, I also want to use Lua as a scripting language and that installation looks more like what LR does by default. 

That hints that this is an LR-related observation, however: Would it be helpful if package maintainers had separate "liblua5.X" and "lua5.X" packages?