Re: Lua libraries

[Steve Dekorte <steve@...>]

On Wednesday, January 30, 2002, at 02:03  AM, Nick Trout wrote:
> > It seems that we are talking about two different things here. I was
> > proposing a standard way of defining lua libraries, that
> > should be portable across multiple platforms,
>
> I think this is the way to go. I cant really can't see the point of 
> writing
> a config file to build a static exe. Thats whats done already.

Not in any of the code I've seen. What's done now is each ad-on comes 
with code for it's own lua executable. Essentially, Lua is added on the 
"libs" instead of the other way around.

> It means that
> the executable needs to contain all libraries available to Lua and if 
> you
> merely want to try something out you have to build a new version etc. It
> doesnt solve the problem.

It depends on which problem you are trying to solve. It does solve the 
problem of being able to easily combine libs.

> > and should for this reason
> > abstract details
> > about the operating system, like the path of the library and
> > prefixes/sufixes.
>
> This would be nice. I think the DLLs just need to be in your path to be
> loaded but it would be nice to add the functionality to search a "lua 
> path"
> for scripts and libraries.

Don't some platforms require the executable to know the absolute path to 
the shared lib while not providing the app with info about the path the 
executable?(Linux?) So the shared libs are essentially required to be in 
system folders and therefore seriously complicate user-level 
applications - admin access is required to install the libs & whose 
shared lib gets installed if two apps have a shared lib with the same 
name? It's dangerous to make the assumption that everyone that will want 
to be able to run a lua app is also a sysadmin.

Making shared libs the standard for lua-addons would make lua both 
platform dependent and sysadmin dependent.

Steve