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

[Philipp Janda <siffiejoe@...>]

Am 08.09.2015 um 22:42 schröbte Coda Highland:
> The way most packaging systems handle this is to give the distinct
> versions distinct package names instead of trying to use the version
> number. For example, in Ubuntu, Python libraries that support both 2
> and 3 are shipped as "python-xxx" and "python3-xxx" (e.g.
> "python-cairo" vs. "python3-cairo").
>
> So you might have mylib_51 version 1.0.2-1, mylib_52 version 1.0.2-1,
> and mylib_53 version 1.0.2-1 -- and, if your 5.1 version isn't
> LuaJIT-compatible for whatever reason, perhaps mylib_lj version
> 1.0.2-1 or similar.

That's difficult, because LuaRocks doesn't support alternative 
dependencies, so something like
    dependencies = {
      "mylib_51 >= 1.0 | mylib_52 >= 1.0 | mylib_53 >= 1.0"
    }
won't work.

On the other hand LuaRocks does support separate manifests for the 
different Lua versions, so that `luarocks-5.1 install mylib` will 
install the latest mylib version that's compatible with Lua 5.1.
There's nothing wrong with taking advantage of that fact. It's 
unfortunate though that ULua currently does things differently.

> /s/ Adam

Philipp