Re: LuaRocks with Windows/Visual Studio

[Ralph Hempel <rhempel@...>]

Mark Meijer wrote:

> Also, what are the thoughts on this list about rocks that do not
> install on all platforms that LuaRocks itself supports, especially
> those in the default LuaRocks repository? By platform I don't only
> mean OS, but also compiler (I imagine that most of these rocks would
> compile with cygwin or MinGW, although I haven't tried it since I
> don't normally use either of them, yet).

This is why I've been trying to update rockspecs for module builds that
only specify the source required to build the rocks. So far I've got
the three rocks I use the most - lfs, luasocket, and luasql - built
using the updated rockspec.

I (and probably the rest of the group) really appreciate the work you've
done to document your experience here.

> Lastly, slightly off-topic, I am considering stepping away from Visual
> Studio for my day-to-day needs (I'm sick and tired of the
> compatibility problems). If anyone has any suggestions or
> considerations regarding what my next choice of compiler might be (for
> use on windows), I'm all ears. I'm not too keen on cygwin, but MinGW
> seems like a good choice.

I and a few others really pushed the Cygwin folks to finally implement
a command line option to install specific packages. This feature will
be fully supported in the upcoming Cygwin 1.7 and it makes installing
Cygwin MUCH easier. No more GUI with click this, select that etc, just
run a batch file.

That being said, I do use the -mno-cygwin option to build mingw 
compatible executables for Windows using Cygwin. So I guess I vote
for Cygwin as an alternative development environment.

I find that the base Mingw install is easy, but then you need to
scout around for extras like flex and bison. I also feel that Cygwin
is more actively maintained.

My 2 cents...

Ralph