[ANN] Lua for Linux, alpha release

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

Hi guys,

Lua4Linux is a compact batteries-included Lua distribution that aims
to be the counterpart to Lua for Windows.  Together with SciTE, the
binary is only 2M.

The binary includes both luajit and standard lua51 executables, the
latter without readline.  So far the luajit binary tends to work ok on
64bit systems;  everything was tested against luajit, which required a
few little tweaks to some old-fashioned test code that used the old
varargs syntax. This is stock lua/luajit, with one exception: to allow
for local install, these versions use the fact that /proc/PID/exe is a
symlink to the actual location of the executable.  So installation is
a simple matter of unpacking, and running ./install from the top-level
lua directory, which will create symlinks to the executables.

SciTE is included, which may not be to your taste, but supplying an
editing and debugging environment for Lua seemed appropriate for a
'starter' pack, just as with LfW. luagdb is also included, which
provides Lua debugging for Emacs.

Libraries included:
lfs, posix, ex, bc, alarm, complex, mathx, socket, copas, alien, lxp,
lua-gtk, lexpect, luagdb and penlight.

The documentation is in an early state, but there is an index.html in
the lua directory which points to the library documentation.

Building on a 64bit Red Hat machine worked fine, if -fPIC is enabled.
The config file in lua/src gives some options and attempts to do some
sanity checks, like checking for the existence of libreadline-dev  The
goal is to have a basic configure script.

A earlier version of lua-gtk is included - the main mod is that it
reads the actual GTK libraries used from lua/gtk.config.  LuaGnome is
somewhat of a bitch to build, but I aim to include it in the source
once I have mastered it ;)

The key word here is _alpha_, so expect some roughness and trouble.
Ryan and I have been debating what else needs to go in L4L, and wxLua
was mentioned as one way of getting cross-platform GUIs going.

The /proc/PID/exe hack is of course not portable to other systems,
notably OS X.  If we could find a more cross-platform way for POSIX
executables to find themselves, I would be happy to move to it.

Accessing and using LuaRocks repositories is the next goal, to avoid
having to put _everything_ into one distribution.

steve d.

Binary:
http://mysite.mweb.co.za/residents/sdonovan/lua/Lua4Linux-0.1.tgz

Source:
http://mysite.mweb.co.za/residents/sdonovan/lua/Lua4Linux-src-0.1.tgz