[ANN] LuaDist Batteries 0.9.7

[Peter Drahoš <drahosp@...>]

Announcing new binaries of the LuaDist batteries project.

The batteries sub-project aims to reproduce the LuaForWindows[1] distribution using LuaDist[2]. With LuaDist we can reproduce the same functionality on multiple platforms and compilers. The Windows release is currently built using MinGW32 and requires no additional runtime dependencies to be installed. Combined with the portable nature of the distribution (no install required, just unpack) this makes the project suitable for distribution of Lua-based applications.

Binaries for Windows, Ubuntu and OSX are now available for download[3].

Unix users can build from source using: (CMake and git required)
echo "$(curl -fksSL https://raw.github.com/gist/2394281/luadist.sh)" | bash

CHANGES:

Lua applications as executables
-------------------------------

The former approach for construction of executable lua applications was to compile a minimal lua interpreter during the build process with the embedded source of the lua application. For this release we adopted the use of srlua[4]. LuaDist will now automatically use srlua when available and produce applications without need to compile. End users can now also build executables from their lua sources using glue and srlua.

This behavior is optional and plain ".lua" files can still be installed by using "-DSKIP_LUA_WRAPPER=true" option when calling CMake or using the luadist commandline utility.

LuaDist now supports component install
--------------------------------------

The luadist utility can now track the components of the installed packages. You can now selectively delete or install components to your deployment directories. For example removing all documentation, tests and headers can be done using:

./luadist remove -components=Example,Test,Header

or we can only install runtime components of lua

./luadist minimal_lua install lua -components=Runtime

Recognized components: Documentation,Example,Test,Other,Header,Library,Runtime,Unspecified

More documentation on the topic can be found on our wiki[5]

Minimal Windows package
-----------------------

A minimal binary version of batteries-0.9.7 is available for Windows that does not contain any documentation, examples, tests or other optional files (it still contains license files). Additionally all binaries have been striped and packed using UPX. This package is most suitable starting point for distribution of Lua based applications to end users.

Module Updates and Fixes
------------------------

Most batteries related modules have been updated to the latest version. Some known broken packages are now fixed (most notably libpq) but testing still remains a priority in this release. Complete list of packages is available here[6].

Other Changes
-------------

Lua and srlua applications now have higher quality icons on Windows. OSX binaries are now built without linking to the readline library that is not available on OSX 10.6, please note that this needs testing as we do not have access to a 10.6 system anymore.

Please submit any suggestions, bugs and module requests to our issue tracker[7].

Peter Drahoš on behalf of the LuaDist project.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/luaforwindows/
[2] http://www.luadist.org
[3] https://github.com/LuaDist/Repository/downloads
[4] http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lhf/ftp/lua/
[5] https://github.com/LuaDist/Repository/wiki
[6] https://gist.github.com/3945996
[7] https://github.com/LuaDist/Repository/issues