Anyway, from a users point of view its is still difficult to install a
stable Linux and to get the newest stable lua stuff from the distro.
It should be a breeze to compile Lua from source. As mentioned
in the Getting started http://www.lua.org/start.html>,
Download <http://www.lua.org/download.html>, and FAQ
<http://www.lua.org/faq.html#1.1> pages, these commands should work:
curl -R -O http://www.lua.org/ftp/lua-5.2.3.tar.gz
tar zxf lua-5.2.3.tar.gz
cd lua-5.2.3
make linux test
The only sore point might be the absence of readline.h.
It has remained a source of noise, unfortunately.
Only Readme <http://www.lua.org/manual/5.2/readme.html> mentions how to
solve this... (Use "make linux MYLIBS=-ltermcap".)