Re: [ANN] luaposix 33.4.0 released

[Hisham <h@...>]

On 27 February 2016 at 15:04, Gary V. Vaughan <gary@vaughan.pe> wrote:
> Hi Steve,
>
> Thanks for the feedback :)
>
>> On 27 Feb 2016, at 15:02, steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 4:44 PM, Gary V. Vaughan <gary@vaughan.pe> wrote:
>>>  - posix.curses has been split back out into its own separate
>>>    project again.
>>
>> Gary, I think this is a good decision.  Most Lua people on Unix-y
>> systems need luaposix to interface with the system. Curses programming
>> is entertaining, but a minority pursuit.
>
> I thinks so too. Also, it allows the lcurses binding not to be constrained
> by the POSIX curses API, so we can add ncurses mouse functions among others.
>
> I’ve been on a simplify-and-separate binge of late, and have been wondering
> whether luaposix is more useful as one giant library that tries to cover the
> entire POSIX API, or whether it would be better to follow stdlib’s lead and
> break it into multiple rocks along some (yet-to-be-determined) boundaries,
> with a backwards compatibility luaposix rock that pulls in everything else?
>
> It was surprising how much cruft I was able to eject by splitting up stdlib,
> and making a clean break from supporting older versions of the API — and
> luaposix is carrying many hundreds of lines of code to support deprecated
> calls and types, so it would likely benefit even more.
>
> I won’t get to it for some time, but I’d definitely be interested to hear
> if anyone would shed a tear if I made some future release that similarly
> made a clean break from supporting previous APIs?

My use of luaposix in LuaRocks (as an optional component) is currently
quite minimal (posix.chmod and posix.stat, and we even work around for
the fact that an ancient version of luaposix didn't support octal
notation for posix.chmod; we currently convert it to rwx notation
manually — I wonder if by now we could safely clean that up from our
code). So no, no tears from my side, I guess. :)

Also, +1 for lcurses being a binding for ncurses, rather than POSIX
curses. Ncurses is evolving: version 6.0 now includes scroll wheel
support, for example.

-- Hisham