Re: Lua53 in the FreeBSD Ports Collection

[Daurnimator <quae@...>]

On 10 September 2017 at 16:44, Russell Haley <russ.haley@gmail.com> wrote:
>  - files/patch-src__Makefile - This patch adds support for *.so files.
> Can I ask why there is no built in target for shared objects files in
> Lua? I am probably missing something. I checked the tarball and git. I
> also tried to look this subject up on the archives but couldn't find
> anything.

It has been discussed many times (but hasn't come up in a few years now).
When the lua team has attempted to provide a shared library target,
all the distros end up modifying them anyway:
  - Some demand use of libtool
  - Some refuse to use libtool
  - Flags are not consistent between platforms
  - Flags are not consistent between compilers
  - Some want soname versioning
  - Some want symbol versioning
etc.

Unable to satisfy more than a single party at once, lua removed the
shared object target from the distributed makefile: it's now up to
distros to do things in their preferred manner.

> - The second post patch seems to change rand to random. My question
> is: Is this patch necessary, does it affect other platforms, and
> should it be pushed upstream?

This patch is not necessary. See code it changes is unreachable if you
define LUA_USE_POSIX.

> Also to consider, there are now a number of patches listed for 5.3.4
> on the bugs list. My assumption is that those are not in the official
> tarball, but ARE in the head revision of the GitHub repo?

The HEAD of the github repository is *not* lua 5.3. it contains the
work in progress to then next release (5.4).

> I'm trying
> to find the shortest path to a clean port file so my question is:
> would it be easier to manually assemble the patches and continue
> including a file and patching the tarball, or is there some merit to
> switching over and downloading from GitHub based on a commit?
>
> In conclusion, the failure of the freebsd target in my tests and the
> heavy modification to the base makefile leads me to think it might be
> worthwhile to switch to GitHub and use the base makefile to
> springboard a separate FreeBSD  makefile altogether. Thoughts?

Do not change over to using the github repository.
It is intended to be a view into the history of lua's development at a
granular level.
It does not include all pieces (e.g. luac is in a separate repository).