Lua Dist

wiki

LuaDist provides automated CMake building and Lua-based deployment of software.

Description

LuaDist [1] is sort-of like LuaRocks, BSD ports, and RPM:

It's basically a ports system [2] based on CMake [3], which can build software in a cross-platform manner. (CMake is a build system generator that is perhaps the main alternative to autotools.)
It contains a collection of CMake build files (CMakeLists.txt, e.g. [4]) for many packages. These can be used by themselves [5] with CMake to build modules, or the builds can be automated via the the "luadist" utility.
LuaDist can build/deploy many types of things, including applications (e.g. Lua), system libraries (e.g. zlib), Lua modules (e.g. luazlib), and (soon) entire distributions (e.g. Lua for Windows).
It contains a collection of dist.info files (e.g. [6]) containing metadata for packages and written in Lua syntax. These are quite similar to .rockspec files in LuaRocks, though without the build sections.
It contains a mirror of package sources. The sources combined with the build files and dist.info files are zipped into self-contained package files called "dists" (e.g. [7]).
It contains the "luadist" utility and libraries, written in Lua, to automate the process of downloading, building and deploying packages.
"luadist" depends on CMake and a compiler toolchain for building packages from source, but it does not require these if you only deploy binary modules. Other than possibly CMake and a compiler toolchain, LuaDist is self-contained and builds it own dependencies from source.
Though an automated tool has not yet been written, it's fairly straightforward to translate LuaDist packages to LuaRocks packages since LuaRocks supports CMake builds. The "luarocks" package in LuaDist will also be usable to deploy LuaRocks if desired.

Installation

To build Lua 5.1 and some module of your choice from source, do this:

svn co https://luadist.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/luadist/trunk luadist
cd luadist
./build
cd _install/*
./bin/luadist install md5
./bin/lua -lmd5 -e "print(md5.sumhexa 'test')"

# For Windows builds, see below instead.
# For a Debian-based Linux, you may need to first install dependent packages:
#   sudo apt-get install subversion gcc make cmake

The above first checks out the latest LuaDist source (svn version since LuaDist is still much under development). Then we build it. You'll need to have cmake installed. The build process builds a simple Lua executable for bootstrapping LuaDist (which itself is written in Lua), then it builds full luafilesystem and luasocket modules (required by LuaDist), and finally it installs this in a subdirectory of "_install". We then use LuaDist to download, build, and install some module (e.g. md5). Lastly, we test the module in Lua.

For Windows users, MinGW or Cygwin builds are similar, but for Visual C++, do this:

Start up Microsoft Visual C++ Express and do "Tools > Visual Studio Command Prompt" (this is the same as running vcvars32.bat).
Set the PATH for CMake.
Do similar steps:

set PATH=%PATH%;c:\cmake-2.6\bin
svn co https://luadist.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/luadist/trunk luadist
cd luadist
build_msvc.bat
cd _install\msvc
bin\luadist install md5
bin\lua -lmd5 -e "print(md5.sumhexa 'test')"

If you're more adventurous, try "luadist install iup". We can even build regular C libraries ("luadist install libexpat")--it's not just for Lua! To your surprise, this stuff even builds on Windows, or at least is close to building, thanks to CMake.

For MinGW, set "PATH=%PATH%;c:\MinGW\bin" prior to running build.bat. Temporarily remove sh.exe from "c:\MinGW\bin" to avoid conflict.

LuaJIT

To install LuaJIT 2 beta, just run "luadist install luajit2" following the above instructions. To build a release version with full optimizations be sure to instead do "luadist install luajit2 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release". This replaces your standard Lua with LuaJIT. Note that the LuaJIT binary is called "lua" not "luajit".

Under Windows you may get a obscure error about "is not recognized as an internal or external command" at the very end of this due to the .bat file being replaced while running. This is harmless.

2.0.0-beta1 debug version build under MSVC crashes. Use a release version build.

To reinstall standard Lua do "luadist remove lua" followed by "luadist install lua". Don't first do "luadist remove luajit2" since luadist will then no longer run.

If you break your LuaDist installation, you can reinstall standard Lua from the boostrapping version of LuaDist:

_bootstrap\*\luadist-bootstrap remove lua
_bootstrap\*\luadist-bootstrap install lua
(note: prefix the above by "sh " on Unix-like systems)

Some pointers

To see a list of distributions available, do "luadist search" (or "luadist help" for other commands).
Edit "dists/luadist-1.0.0/lmod/dist/config.lua.in" to set configuration options before building (or _install/*/share/lua/lmod/dist/config.lua after building). For example, enable verbose and disable cleanup to see more what's going on. Distributions are extracted and built in a "tmp" folder--if a build fails, enter the build directory, fix the CMakeLists.txt file, and do "luadist make".
For any questions, post on the [mail list] or here.
A number of modules don't build on some platforms. Please help test and fix CMakeLists.txt files (learn CMake [8]). Some quirks in the LuaDist software are still being worked out. We're working toward a 1.0 release.
LuaRocks also supports CMake builds, so there are some opportunities for combining the two. In fact, "luadist install luarocks" will work, though it's somewhat broken at the moment.

User Comments