Re: ​Dead Batteries

[Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo <lhf@...>]

> The progress of Lua from 5.1, 5.2 to 5.3 and soon 5.4 has created a problem -  many of the previously released pre-complied libraries have not been updated and will not run under 5.3.

I used to have different versions of my libraries [1], one for each
version of Lua. It took some work but not too much to maintain
separate versions. In July 2018 [2] I moved to a single source code
for 5.3 with an #include for compatibility across Lua versions. I
expect that updating my libraries to 54 will be a breeze with this
approach. Overall, I'm very happy with this approach, especially
because my libraries are now self-contained and include third-party
libraries when needed, and also because they build out of the box in
Linux and macOS. (Unfortunately, I never got them into LuaRocks,
probably because I misunderstood Hisham's instructions about how to
write a LuaRocks-friendly Makefile. I'd love if someone could help me
there [3].)

I've also released a binary distribution of Lua with my libraries
pre-compiled [4]. Apparently, it attracted no interest at all. Perhaps
because it was for macOS only. I expect that multi-platform binary
distributions are indeed a LOT of work.

[1] http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lhf/ftp/lua/
[2] http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2018-07/msg00671.html
[3] http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2019-04/msg00119.html
[4] http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2013-07/msg00499.html