Re: To all Lua rock maintainers (also included considerations on Lua's ecosystem and a Lua distribution)

[Stefano <phd.st.p@...>]

On 8 Sep 2015 04:54, "Daurnimator" <quae@daurnimator.com> wrote:
>
> On 7 September 2015 at 18:25, Stefano <phd.st.p@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 7 September 2015 at 02:10, Daurnimator <quae@daurnimator.com> wrote:
> >>   - Looks like ULua only supports lua 5.1? this isn't mentioned
> >> anywhere on your site
> >
> > Yes, it is based on LuaJIT which is compatible with Lua 5.1.
> > I do not have immediate plans to repeat the exercise for Lua 5.2 and
> > 5.2, but if there is a enough request for this I might reconsider.
>
> Add "this is a LuaJIT (lua 5.1 compatible distribution)" to the home page then.
>
> >>   - The list is hard to look through; could you make it more
> >> browsable? e.g a table?
> >
> > You are right, it is not optimal for human consumption (it is the
> > database used by automated build system).
> > I will pre-process it to make it more readable.
>
> Please do so; don't forget to share the link :)
>
> >>       - at least take out the unsupported_external_library errors
> >>   - Seems like you don't handle multiple rockspecs under the one name
> >>       - e.g. many of lhf's libraries have a different rockspec for
> >> each lua version, and the version number is something like
> >> 2015-01-01.51 for lua 5.1
> >
> > The build system should exclude specs which are for Lua 5.2 and above
> > and try to build the latest stable (and unstable if above the stable)
> > version for the same rock.
> > Can you please point me out to a specific rock where this it is not working?
>
> One I noticed this for is "cqueues" (which I maintain the rockspec for)
> Notice I have a different rockspec for each lua version
> https://luarocks.org/modules/daurnimator/cqueues
> In your lists I only see one (in error.lua)
>
>     cqueues = {
>       ["20150119.53-1"] = "lua == 5.3"
>     },
>

This is because it is not following semantic versioning.

The 51, 52 and 53 look like minor versions and I am attempting the
build of only the latest stable major version plus unstable if more
recent.
So the 51 will always be ignored.

My personal suggestion would be to have a single rock supporting all
three versions of Lua.
In case you are interested in ULua too, please do not use the date for
major: users would never get an updated version automatically.

>
> >>   - Module naming conflicts are hard to solve; all times I've run into
> >> them the authors are uninterested/projects have been abandoned
> >>       - https://github.com/keplerproject/luarocks/issues/388
> >>       - https://github.com/zhaozg/lua-openssl/issues/72
> >
> > I can manually blacklist rocks.
>
> I'm not sure if blacklisting helping; often both modules are useful.
> e.g. for the case of zlib, I prefer brimwork's lua-zlib, but lzlib is
> more widely deployed (due to being a dependency of luarocks).

Well, I am not too kin on having

require 'zip'

load different libraries depending on what has been installed.
At some point I will go through the list of conflicts and resolve them
manually.

Stefano