Re: More about packaging

[Diego Nehab <diego@...>]

Hi,

> For loading (OS dependent) libraries, i believe a function like
> 'require(...)' would help.

The fancier loadlib that I sent in the original post kind of solves the
problem of platform dependent library names and locations, more or less
in the same way your requireso does. What I would like to solve is the
problem of a library not knowing whether it's being loaded statically or
dinamically.

The user script will call "require" anyways, but suppose whoever built
the interpreter decided the library should be linked statically. Calling
require would probably fail, not finding the file. For Lua libraries,
maybe if we modify the _LOADED table appropriately, we can prevent
require from failing. The Wiki suggests having a simple Lua loader for
each dynamic C library. This allows users to use require both for Lua
modules and dynamic libraries. I like the idea, but it would be nice to
have the static vs dynamic transparency built in, and this is what I
wanted to discuss.

For libraries that have both a C part and a Lua part, the thing gets a
little messier. Our smtp module needs help from C, so we have smtp.lua and
smtp.so. I wonder what is a clean way of loading such a
module, that works both statically and dynamically when the user
script calls require"smtp"...

[]s,
Diego.