Re: Packaging Lua libraries

[Thatcher Ulrich <tu@...>]

On Mar 30, 2004 at 02:30 -0300, Danilo Tuler wrote:
> > What about 3rd party libraries for those languages? I talked 
> > to a Windows guy I know and he said that in Perl at least 
> > they are named following the <libname>.dll scheme, e.g. 
> > mysql.dll or DBI.dll.
> 
> Yes. In Perl, all 3rd party libraries are redistributed as DLLs (with import
> libraries).

In this case, are the import libraries ever used?

Anyway, on the topic of consensus on filenames, luacheia's current
convention for dll's is:

*.lua   -- for the Lua module loader
lua*.dll / lua*.so -- for the dynamically loaded binary part, if any
liblua-5.dll / liblua-5.so / liblua-5.dylib -- for the Lua core
liblualib-5.dll / liblualib-5.so / liblualib-5.dylib -- for the Lua standard libraries

For binary modules, I think we could drop the lua prefix, if there's
consensus that this is a good idea.  I believe our original rationale
was to maintain LuaBinaryModule compatibility, but personally I
wouldn't miss the extra 'lua' on all those files; it makes the module
directory listings kinda confusing.

The liblua-5.so and liblualib-5.so have the lib prefix due to
Linux/Unix convention, and need to stay that way, I believe.  The
dll's and dylib's keep the prefix for consistency.

Re using "luaopen_*" for the module entry point for binary modules:
that sounds like a good convention to me.  luacheia does not mandate a
convention here, because luacheia always includes a specific stub
loader, but a generic stub loader seems handy.

luacheia uses "luaLM_import" for the entry points of many of its
modules, from the LuaBinaryModules precedent, but this can certainly
be changed if consensus warrants it.

As far as directories go, luacheia does have some existing standards;
this page talks about it:

http://luacheia.lua-users.org/doc/module-paths.html

-- 
Thatcher Ulrich
http://tulrich.com