Re: A suggestion for Lua 5.3 manual Section 8 (was "A rant about backward-incompatible changes")

[Coda Highland <chighland@...>]

On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 8:44 AM, Peter Aronoff <telemachus@arpinum.org> wrote:
> Coda Highland <chighland@gmail.com> wrote:
>> It's already THERE -- just not in 5.3, but in 5.2 where that change actually
>> happened:
>>
>> http://www.lua.org/manual/5.2/manual.html#8.2
>
> Then I'm even more confused. Why did my tests pass just fine under Lua 5.2
> without warning? Was the deprecation only in Lua 5.2's documentation? I'm pretty
> sure that I was running these tests using vanilla Lua 5.1 and 5.2 builds, and
> everything remained fine.

PUC-Rio made a decision to enable the 5.1 compatibility flags in 5.2
by default. It is exactly this kind of confusion that demonstrates
that their decision to change this default in all future versions was
indeed wise.

> I suppose I'm saying that the notice should go in the 5.3 manual (even if it's
> redundant for some people), because 5.3 is when code actually began to break.
> Does that make sense?

I will point out the following excerpts:

5.2 section 8:

"You can avoid some incompatibilities by compiling Lua with
appropriate options (see file luaconf.h). However, all these
compatibility options will be removed in the next version of Lua.
Similarly, all features marked as deprecated in Lua 5.1 have been
removed in Lua 5.2."

5.3 section 8:

"Here we list the incompatibilities that you may find when moving a
program from Lua 5.2 to Lua 5.3. You can avoid some incompatibilities
by compiling Lua with appropriate options (see file luaconf.h).
However, all these compatibility options will be removed in the
future."

This seems pretty clear to me. I mean, maybe luaconf.h could be made a
link to the file in the source code and a link to the previous
version's deprecation notes could be included, but it tells you
exactly where to look as it is.

/s/ Adam