Re: Proposal: smartlua

[mchalkley@...]

Friday, March 8, 2013, 1:30:36 AM, the emminently qualified Steve D. wrote:

> So the question would be: what would be the preferred workflow?  The
> way I imagine it going is that a person has a nice Lua program and
> wishes to deploy it on multiple machines and hand it out to chums.  A
> 'smart' Lua would  analyze the dependencies and pull the required libs
> into an archive (it would just be a zip file with a manifest, like a
> .jar file).  That would be the 'executable.' and it would be by design
> completely self-contained.  It could get fairly large (e.g. a wxLua
> application would have the wxWidgets DLLs) but convenience always
> comes at a price.

Would it greatly complicate the process to allow the "deployer" to
specify a list of Lua programs, so all the necessary
libs/modules/extra bits, as determined by a dependency analysis, could
be in a single archive?  That way, you wouldn't have to repeat the
ones used over and over again.  It might get large, but it wouldn't be
replicated every time you added a program.  In fact, there could even
be an "installer" that added everything to the existing archive on the
target machine, if it already exists.  Then, anybody could share Lua
programs with anybody and the only thing that would end up being
deployed would be the Lua program itself, and any dependencies not
already on the target machine.  Deploying a second application might
only add a few hundred bytes to the target machine...

Mark