Re: Lua-friendly OSes

[Ben Kelly <ranavin@...>]

On Thu, 20 Oct 2011 20:27:59 +0100
Matthew Wild <mwild1@gmail.com> wrote:

> > On which systems has the Lua ecosystem (libraries, etc) developed
> > best?
> 
> Windows (thanks to Lua for Windows), Debian/Ubuntu (thanks to the
> quality and quantity of Lua packages in the repository, including
> LuaRocks).
> 
> Platforms I've encountered less Lua joy on are the RPM-based Linux
> distros, including RHEL, CentOS, etc. simply because the packages are
> broken or inadequate, often requiring compiling things from source
> (entirely possible, just less than convenient).
> 

My own experience parallels this.
- Debian and its derivatives (Ubuntu, Mint, etc) reliably have lua and
  a lot of commonly-used modules like luasocket and copas in the
  repositories, once you figure out their weird package naming scheme. 
- Windows would be a pain in the ass, except that for most apps you can
  just say "install Lua for Windows" and you have everything you need;
  it only gets annoying when you need to use a binary library that's not
  included in L4W, or a more recent version than L4W includes.
- OpenSUSE has a weird mix where it has lua, luafilesystem, luaexpat,
  and a bunch of lua binding generators, but is missing other common
  libraries like luasocket.
- Other RPM-based distros like Fedora I've had similar experiences to
  SUSE on, although I haven't used any recently.

	Ben Kelly