Re: [ANN] LuaBinaries

[Mike Pall <mikelu-0504@...>]

Hi,

Daniel Silverstone wrote:
> I'm not sure if anything in Debian uses liblua but not liblualib. It may
> make sense to combine them into one library.

A reverse dependency search shows that all of the packages need both.
Splitting Lua up into 6 packages is maybe overdoing it a bit?

> > As Mike already commented, do we really need shared libraries outside
> > Windows?
> 
> Yes, Very much so. I count seven programs other than Lua itself which
> depend on liblua50 in Debian And another three or four which use
> liblua40

No. There is no intrinsic necessity. All of the referenced packages
embed Lua and are at least an order of magnitude larger than Lua itself.
Static linking would work just fine. Lua is not libc. Nobody is likely
to run any of these packages in parallel or would even take notice.

If you really insist on making shared libraries (for whatever policy
reason) -- ok, go ahead. But please, please do NOT link the main 'lua'
standalone executable with it! As I explained, the performance of the
Lua core VM suffers badly when compiled with -fPIC on x86.

This is highly unfair to Lua when compared to other languages. E.g. the
'Great Computer Language Shootout' uses Debian binaries as a base. 
And of course they'll point back to Debian when we'd approach them
about compiling Lua properly and fairly. This is not going to help
the cause of Lua.

[Hey ... or make /usr/bin/perl link against libperl*.so. Sure would
 be a fair deal. Oh and it would save 1 MB (_one_ Megabyte!) on
 everyone's disk. Let's see the ensuing storm ...]

Bye,
     Mike