Re: Why nobody talks about Lua

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

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 7:06 PM, Stuart P. Bentley
<stuart@testtrack4.com> wrote:
> I've found the Lua for Windows distribution to be magnificent for this. Its
> stated goal is to be a "batteries included" distribution of Lua, and I've
> found that to be pretty accurate (although IUP, CD, IM, LuaGL and LuaSocket
> are the only batteries I ever need). Now what we need is a Debian
> metapackage so we can have the equivalent on Ubuntu...

Last year I did some experiments with 'Lua for Linux' which avoided
Debian-specific stuff. It provided a reasonable core set of libraries
(without SciTE, it was about a Meg) and LuaRocks for extension.  At
the time, the response was 'Well why don't you do this using the
obviously standard apt-get package manager?'.  And the reason I gave
was that Linux is more than Debian; in fact, Unix is more than LInux,
so I started thinking about 'Lua for Unix' and got a build going on OS
X as well.

The strategy seems sound, relying on LuaRocks 2.0 as the extension
mechanism.  The downside of _not_ assuming that one has a GTK Linux
target is that I can't deploy some favourites like LuaGTK and SciTE ;)

The _big_ advantage of a Debian-focussed distro is that the external
dependencies can be expressed in terms of other Debian packages,
something that LuaRocks can only give hints about.

And then (yes) we have the LuaDist approach, which is completely
platform-agnostic but requires CMake configurations for everything
that needs to be consumed.

steve d.