Re: How to avoid DLL hell?

[Nick Gammon <nick@...>]

On 21/11/2010, at 9:15 PM, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo wrote:

> There is no ABI compatibility between 5.1 and 5.2.
> All Lua libraries in C must be recompiled.

I understand that point. But it isn't just me. I have thousands of users. Some have the latest version of the program (and its associated DLLs) and older Lua scripts. Some have new scripts but older versions of the program. I don't know where they will have put all their DLLs. 

The whole idea of Lua scripts is, people write their own. People grab Luasocket, wxLua, Luacom from LuaBinaries. Maybe a friend did it for them. Maybe the MUD (game) administrator packaged it up for them, a couple of years ago. Some scripts will need updating (because of modules, loadstring, setfenv etc.). Quite a lot of users won't understand why or how. Some of the original authors will have moved on.

I don't want to sound negative. I love Lua. I think it's great. But I just don't see how I can get people to do stuff like "replace core.dll and core.dll by core.dll and core.dll" in certain directories, or it will randomly crash every hour when it goes to look up a web page.

And you know what? Trying to help users isn't easy. I beg them to tell me, when they report a problem (in bold writing on the web page) what version they are using. Almost universally, they don't. So we get this ...

"Please tell me what version you are using".
"The latest version".
"The latest version from which web site?".
"Your web site." / "The game web site".
"Which version please? I have stable versions and beta versions available".
"The one on the download page."
"Do you mean version 4.60?"
"How do I find out the version number?"

Sorry for the ranting.