Re: ANN: luacheia alpha1 release

[Thatcher Ulrich <tu@...>]

On Aug 05, 2003 at 11:09 -0400, John Belmonte wrote:
> This is looking good and builds without any fuss.  I wonder if a few 
> points could be improved:
> 
>     * support for use of external Lua library.  Do you use a stock Lua 
> library compile?  This will be significant when packaging for Debian, 
> etc.

Good point.  Currently luacheia always builds its own Lua libraries,
but presumably we can adjust configure.ac so that it can use any
installed Lua5 libraries.  We do have an existing ./configure option
to select an alternate source directory for the Lua distro, but that's
not really the same thing.

We currently make one change to the stock Lua5, which is to extend
"loadlib()" so that it supports dylib's under OSX.  So far none of the
included modules rely on loadlib() so that's not really an obstacle.

Advice/help on packaging is very welcome, especially if you know
something about auto* tools!

> Also since IUP also contains the Lua source, and you want to make
> IUP a module, at least one of you will have to concede...

Agreed.  I imagine a modulized IUP would use the luacheia build
system, and clearly it would need to link to the same Lua libs as the
core.  AFAIK no luacheia developers have looked at this yet.  I did
some wxLua work though so the issues are probably similar.

Note: we would love it if somebody volunteered to adapt IUP as a
module for luacheia!

(Ditto for debugging the wxLua module, adding other modules, etc!)

>     * rewriting wrapper names (for example, SDL.LoadBMP instead of 
> SDL.SDL_LoadBMP)

Yup, noted.  Basically this is up to whoever the module maintainer is.
If it's me, I generally try to change as little as possible, and set
myself up for as little maintenance work as possible, if I'm working
with an existing lib.

In the case of SDL, Asko Kauppi is in charge of the module now.  When
I made a Lua4 wrapper, I used the double namespace because tolua
didn't have an easy way to remove the prefix.  Plus symbols like
SDLK_* would have needed extra attention.

-- 
Thatcher Ulrich
http://tulrich.com