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

[Tom N Harris <telliamed@...>]

On Wednesday, February 04, 2015 04:39:24 PM Hisham wrote:
> 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).

FreeBSD:

bin/lua5[12]
bin/luajit-2.0 (symlink luajit)
include/lua5[12]/
include/luajit-2.0/
lib/liblua-5.[12].{a,so}
lib/libluajit-2.0.{a,so,so.2,so.2.0}
pkgconfig/lua-5.[12]
pkgconfig/luajit

NetBSD:

bin/lua5.[123]
include/lua-5.[123]/
lib/liblua5.[123].la
pkgconfig/lua-5.[123]
(luajit same as FreeBSD)

Dragonfly BSD has dports like FreeBSD, and an unversioned package that's 
currently 5.1? I'm not sure, the live images don't include Lua.

There's little reason to prefer one over the other. Systems that really care 
about dots in filenames are marginal enough I don't think they matter. (The FAT 
issue is a red herring. No maintained operating systems depend on the 8.3 
names even if they retain backward compatibility with it.)

The only thing is it should be consistent. Debian has it with the standard 
interpreter, everything is "{lib}lua5.?". Luajit is a little different. The 
BSDs are not so consistent even in the same package.

My choice would be to use "lua5.?" as there are many Debian derivative 
distributions and it's similar to the NetBSD naming. Distributors don't have 
to change their build system of course. Just provide a symlink with the 
compatible name. Debian has every variation of the pkgconfig file.

-- 
tom <telliamed@whoopdedo.org>