Re: Building Lua 5.3 from Lua.org on FreeBSD

[Russell Haley <russ.haley@...>]

On Sat, Jul 22, 2017 at 5:13 AM, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo
<lhf@tecgraf.puc-rio.br> wrote:
> The freebsd target was added in Lua 5.1.2 released in 2007. It has
> remained essentially the same since then. At that time we did test it on
> arbornet, a free shell service that is no longer available. Currently,
> we don't have access to FreeBSD to test it, though. We rely on feedback
> from the users of the various platforms. We haven't had a complaint
> about FreeBSD and other targets at all.

I have complained in the past about the make file. Please see:
http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2016-07/msg00401.html --> Contains
some of what is below. For the records, the official FreeBSD port
makefile now contains -fPIC for all platforms
and
http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2016-07/msg00406.html

And Mr. Ahern seems to have had concerns as well, although I didn't
read his emails.

However reviewing the conversations in the archive it doesn't seem to
contain much of the conversations I THOUGHT I had so perhaps my
complaints were all in my head, which is unhelpful for you. :)

> For the record, does the freebsd target work on other FreeBSD systems?

Unmodified, no. I have never been able to build Lua for FreeBSD
unmodified, and the 'official' FreeBSD version is modified my the
maintainer in the poretsmakefile. Mr. JungleBoogie provided a link to
the ports makefile here:
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/head/lang/lua53/Makefile?view=markup&pathrev=435741

All lua Makefiles (tarball and github) require modification to run on
FreeBSD as far as I can tell for the following reasons:

1) gcc is the required compiler for the freebsd target which is not in
the base FreeBSD image
2) The include and linking directories must be modified (done through
the ports system for the 'official' freebsd package) - thanks again
for reminding me Charles. (My brain is working again this morning so I
can remember what LDFlags are for;  as much as I ever understood them
anyway) All libraries in FreeBSD are installed to /usr/local. It has
been that way since I started using FreeBSD 5 years ago with 8.1.
3) I ran into issues with missing -fPIC and always added it to my make
files (outlined in the first email noted above). The official FreeBSD
ports version also does the same for all platforms.
4) As Sean pointed out, it should probably use USE_POSIX not
USE_LINUX. I *think* had tested that once in 2016 and got it to work.
The files, however, were lost in the "Great Zpool Debacle of 2016" (we
speak not of such things).

In conclusions, I doubt many FreeBSD users have complained because the
official port has papered over the difficulties. I personally would be
thrilled to be able to build from the tarball or git without having to
modify the files. I also think the official Makefile in the tarball
should be modified to detect the OS as I suggested in 2016, but I
understand the hesitancy there. That said, we would never know if it
would work if we don't try it!

I'm in kernel land right now but will be looping back to application
layer code next week and will revisit the Makefile if desired.  I
would be honoured to help test and contribute.

Cheers,

Russ