On Mon, Feb 3, 2020 at 10:56 AM Enrico Colombini <
erix@erix.it> wrote:
On 03-Feb-20 14:49, Roberto Ierusalimschy wrote:
> Why don't we all rally behind Luarocks and try to fix those drawbacks?
Not a bad idea, but I'd like to point out (as others have done) that
binary installation on Windows must be painless (read: click-and-go) for
non-programmers that just want to run and possibly modify Lua applications.
Non-programmers shouldn't even be expected to install Lua, much less LuaRocks. Applications on Windows are expected to ship their own dependencies. This calls for a packager, and these already exist.
If you instead mean people who aren't experienced programmers that find themselves with a need to work with Lua code regardless, we have to consider the use case. I would imagine that the majority of the time they're going to be working with Lua embedded into another application, which makes binary distributions of anything generic less helpful.
Also, many programmers are not willing to install a C compiler on
Windows and to spend hours or days to make it all work, especially when
Python installs just fine (well, almost, but there is Anaconda
Distribution for advanced users).
It should be pretty straightforward for a LuaRocks Windows distribution to include a C compiler that's already configured appropriately. This shouldn't be considered an obstacle.
/s/ Adam
