Clamping down on unwanted using "strict"... or others?

[sur-behoffski <sur_behoffski@...>]

G'day,

I'm writing Lua scripts, mostly for my own benefit (e.g. automate
system management tasks), but occasionally I have a specific goal of
sharing the code with others.

Roberto's written a short "strict.lua" script, that resides in the
etc/ subdirectory of the release, but isn't explicitly installed on
at least two Debian-descendant distributions that I've used, including
the source-based Gentoo Linux.

Roberto's script is explicitly compatible with Lua 5.1 and 5.2.  I
haven't checked whether the 5.3 case works (I'm limiting myself to
5.1, for the moment).

As an alternative, I've been using the module "strictness" from
LuaRocks... but LuaRocks itself is something of a moving target: On
Linux Mint (18.3), pre-packaged versions of luarocks only go up to
2.2.0.

As a result, for both Mint and Gentoo, the "luarocks list --outdated"
did not work from packages... I had to bypass the packaging system
(very bad karma) and install 2.4.3.

(I strayed briefly into the world of LuaRocks 3.x while on the Mint
system... many things were flagged as incompatible, and I had to
quickly retreat.)

In summary, I don't need any extra feature that "strictness" gives
me, and I would strongly prefer that I could issue scripts that
worked with Lua binary (or source) distributions that worked
"out-of-the-box", but with "strict.lua" strategically placed to
be on the require search path, such that I did not have to ask the
user to install LuaRocks and/or go through other steps.

So, there are two items that come out of the preceding observations:

     1. How hard is it to convince Debian (and downstream distros)
        to move from 2.2.0 to 2.4.3?; and
     2a. For current Lua releases, can "make install" include copying
         etc/strict.lua to a require-accessible location?; plus
     2b. For older Lua versions (perhaps 5.0 onwards?), can the
         distro choose to add value to the package, by performing
         a suitable placement of strict.lua?

cheers,

s-b etc
programmer, Grouse Software