Kepler, Xavante and CO

[Eike Decker <eike@...>]

Hi

I've wasted a lot of time now on trying to get it run and I am close to giving
up. 

I got in contact with Kepler years ago and I was pretty happy back then how easy
it was to configure and install on windows. 

Contrary to everything that is going on today. So let's go back.

I intended to write a small CGI script. I could have done that without any
external libs like I've done before, but I thought I could just use some libs
because there are always issues with url encoding and so on. So I did download
CGIlua. And Luasocket and LFS of course (though had that already). And then it
got ugly.
I downloaded (had to) then wsapi, xavante, copas, coxpcall, rings. And everytime
I installed a patch, it either threw up an error or, after fixing that, it asked
for another lib. I have not written down these errors I encountered, and maybe I
just needed to read manuals... but for example I've run into the same pit as
reported here and contrary to the answer, it doesn't seem to be fixed in the
zips of luaforge:
http://lists.luaforge.net/pipermail/kepler-project/2008-January/002157.html

When I started all this, I hoped that I could limit the required libs to use CGI
script handling and concentrate on some code without downloading a whole bunch
of different libs. Or at least just downloading them and using them within 5
minutes would have been ok as well...

But in the end I desperately downloaded luarocks and installed kepler-xavante.
Because I did run into several different problems I was unwilling to resolve
since I didn't want to waste a lot of my time on the whole thing to begin
with.

But using luarocks was not as painless as stated on the website. First, rocks is
kinda stubborn to use the default path it seems. But since I am working on a
device with limited space on C, I wanted it to install it on a different drive.
However, when installing kepler I had again to specify these directories while
kepler proposed the default C drive pathes. The kepler installing script asked
at least before creating files on C ... I had then to specify again the
different root directory. Shouldn't this be done automatically? 
But it didn't really work then yet. When I started xavante.exe in the main
directory, a "kepler_init" module was not found. I figured then out that I
could bypass this by switching the working directory to
/rocks/kepler/1.1-1/lua.

Then, FINALLY it worked. 

However the whole process was a bit disappointing. I remember quite well when I
installed kepler the first time with it's setup.exe file. It was really easy.
Point and click and run. Now I am not new to the package system - after all I
did use some debian systems and am familiar with apt-get and such tools. So the
idea of having a system that allows me to download packages of all kind is
appealing. But why do I need to specify the installation directories everytime?
I am aware that this is no issue if unix is used because the file structure is
normally quite the same on each system and harddrive limitations are less a
problem because filesystems can be mounted in directories etc. etc. 
But on windows, I would expect things to work a bit different. 

I really love Lua. But this was a kinda frustrating morning and I didn't want to
spend so much time on it after all.

- Eike