Re: [gentoo-dev] the state of dev-lang/lua

[Patrick McLean <chutzpah@gentoo.org>]

On Mon, 25 Mar 2019 04:23:08 +0000
"Robin H. Johnson" <robbat2@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Mar 23, 2019 at 04:23:27PM -0500, William Hubbs wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > Soon I will be working on fixing up the state of dev-lang/lua, and
> > there are a couple of things I want to mention.
> > 
> > The first thing is liblua as a shared library. If you are using lua
> > internally in a program, upstream strongly recommends not linking it
> > this way; it is supposed to be statically linked into the
> > executable. Because of this, and because of the amount of custom
> > patching we do to maintain liblua as a shared library, I plan to
> > stop creating the shared library.  
> Please don't go back to static libraries. Look at the other major
> distros, all of them shipped shared Lua as the primary method.

+1

> 
> > I'm a bit undecided still about slotting lua. I'm sure we
> > need subslots so we can force rebuilds when new lua releases enter
> > the tree. However, I'm still unsure whether we need slots. I don't
> > know of many things in the tree that are locked to a specific
> > version of lua (there is only one package based on an irc
> > conversation I had this week).
> > Does anyone have any thoughts?   
> Lua needs first class slots, just like Python & Ruby, not just
> subslots. Changing between versions can be a major undertaking.
> 
> I think the slots to start with should be:
> - lua5.1
> - lua5.2
> - lua5.3
> - luajit5.1 (this is basically an alternative implementation of
> Lua5.1, much like pypy implements Python2).

I think we are going to have to have slots for the "openresty" lua
fork here as well. Several nginx modules require this version to work
properly (I can provide more details if needed).