[gentoo-dev] [RFC] Dropping dev-lang/lua:5.2

[gentoo-dev] [RFC] Dropping dev-lang/lua:5.2

[Marek Szuba]

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Dear everyone,

As many (if not most) of you know, the Lua ecosystem is somewhat awkward 
owing to the facts that on the one hand dev-lang/lua upstream has never 
officially declared end of life on older versions, and on the other 
dev-lang/luajit has never moved beyond 5.1 with their API support. 
Still, this doesn't mean WE have to support all branches in 
perpetuity... Between 5.1 being effectively here to stay due to LuaJIT 
and 5.4 still being relatively new (meaning it cannot feasibly replace 
5.3 at this point), I would like to start by getting rid of 5.2 first.

Having just had a look on p.g.o. at the list of packages utilising the 
relevant USE_EXPAND flags (as well as at net-proxy/haproxy, which 
*still* hasn't been ported to Lua eclasses), it looks like it would in 
fact be quite easy to do - among both single- and multi-impl Lua 
revdeps, there are none which only support 5.2.

PS. Another benefit here would be that we wouldn't have to deal with 
internal interpreter weirdness demonstrated by 
https://bugs.gentoo.org/768048 which upstream have long since fixed in 
5.3+ but my experiments suggest would be non-trivial to address in 5.2 
without risking serious breakage.

WDYT?

-- 
Marecki


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Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Dropping dev-lang/lua:5.2

[William Hubbs]

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On Fri, Jul 09, 2021 at 11:36:21AM +0100, Marek Szuba wrote:
> Dear everyone,
> 
> As many (if not most) of you know, the Lua ecosystem is somewhat awkward 
> owing to the facts that on the one hand dev-lang/lua upstream has never 
> officially declared end of life on older versions, and on the other 
> dev-lang/luajit has never moved beyond 5.1 with their API support. 
> Still, this doesn't mean WE have to support all branches in 
> perpetuity... Between 5.1 being effectively here to stay due to LuaJIT 
> and 5.4 still being relatively new (meaning it cannot feasibly replace 
> 5.3 at this point), I would like to start by getting rid of 5.2 first.

Actually upstream does say when they will stop supporting each version
[1].

5.1 can go because luajit would cover it, but 5.2 is also a candidate.

William

[1] http://www.lua.org/versions.html

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Dropping dev-lang/lua:5.2

[Marek Szuba]

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On 2021-07-09 15:35, William Hubbs wrote:

>> As many (if not most) of you know, the Lua ecosystem is somewhat awkward
>> owing to the facts that on the one hand dev-lang/lua upstream has never
>> officially declared end of life on older versions,
> 
> Actually upstream does say when they will stop supporting each version
> [1].

Um, where? Because I've looked at this page before, I've looked at it 
again just now and I all can see there is that there will be no further 
releases of Lua versions up to and including 5.2, and that there will 
*probably* be no more 5.3 releases. No official End of Life statements, 
no EOL timeline, and 5.3 is apparently both dead and alive at the same 
time - which is fine for cats but not so for software.

> 5.1 can go because luajit would cover it

Alas, not quite.

One, we've got quite a few packages in the tree which currently declare 
compatibility with lua5-1 but not luajitt. This could probably be 
addressed quite easily, the worst I have seen so far after substituting 
luajit for lua5-1 is some memory leaks, but it will take some time and 
effort to test all such packages.

Two, more importantly, making LuaJIT the only available implementation 
of the 5.1 API would severely cripple Lua support on alpha, hppa, ia64, 
riscv, s390 and sparc (which have all got keywords on dev-lang/lua:5.1 
but are not supported by LuaJIT at all) as well as force arm64 and 
ppc64le users to use a 2.1-beta version. This I am afraid might be the 
deal breaker, as I honestly cannot imagine Gentoo suddenly implementing 
support for all those arches.

-- 
Marecki


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Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Dropping dev-lang/lua:5.2

[William Hubbs]

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On Fri, Jul 09, 2021 at 04:49:59PM +0100, Marek Szuba wrote:
> On 2021-07-09 15:35, William Hubbs wrote:
> 
> >> As many (if not most) of you know, the Lua ecosystem is somewhat awkward
> >> owing to the facts that on the one hand dev-lang/lua upstream has never
> >> officially declared end of life on older versions,
> > 
> > Actually upstream does say when they will stop supporting each version
> > [1].
> 
> Um, where? Because I've looked at this page before, I've looked at it 
> again just now and I all can see there is that there will be no further 
> releases of Lua versions up to and including 5.2, and that there will 
> *probably* be no more 5.3 releases. No official End of Life statements, 
> no EOL timeline, and 5.3 is apparently both dead and alive at the same 
> time - which is fine for cats but not so for software.

I guess it is a matter of interpretation then, "there will be no further
releases" means end of life, to me anyway.

I do agree that we aren't sure about 5.3, but "there will be no further
releases" is pretty clear to me.
Older than lua 5.3 is dead.

> > 5.1 can go because luajit would cover it
> 
> Alas, not quite.
> 
> One, we've got quite a few packages in the tree which currently declare 
> compatibility with lua5-1 but not luajitt. This could probably be 
> addressed quite easily, the worst I have seen so far after substituting 
> luajit for lua5-1 is some memory leaks, but it will take some time and 
> effort to test all such packages.
> 
> Two, more importantly, making LuaJIT the only available implementation 
> of the 5.1 API would severely cripple Lua support on alpha, hppa, ia64, 
> riscv, s390 and sparc (which have all got keywords on dev-lang/lua:5.1 
> but are not supported by LuaJIT at all) as well as force arm64 and 
> ppc64le users to use a 2.1-beta version. This I am afraid might be the 
> deal breaker, as I honestly cannot imagine Gentoo suddenly implementing 
> support for all those arches.

Some of the arches you listed are not stable, so I don't think we have
to worry about those arches (see arches.desc). If the arch isn't stable,
we can't guarantee anything.

There is activity in luajit upstream, so hopefully they will do a new
release that supports the newer lua versions. I do agree that it is
problematic that they only support lua 5.1.

William


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Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Dropping dev-lang/lua:5.2

[Marek Szuba]

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On 2021-07-09 17:34, William Hubbs wrote:

>>> Actually upstream does say when they will stop supporting each version
>>> [1].
>>
>> Um, where? Because I've looked at this page before, I've looked at it
>> again just now and I all can see there is that there will be no further
>> releases of Lua versions up to and including 5.2, and that there will
>> *probably* be no more 5.3 releases. No official End of Life statements,
>> no EOL timeline, and 5.3 is apparently both dead and alive at the same
>> time - which is fine for cats but not so for software.
> 
> I guess it is a matter of interpretation then, "there will be no further
> releases" means end of life, to me anyway.

Okay, in that case everyone who interprets this as Lua 5.1 having 
officially been EOLed can substitute the relevant part of the first 
sentence of my RFC with "the Lua ecosystem is a bloody nightmare because 
new versions regularly introduce API incompatibilities and a lot of 
application developers have never bothered to update their Lua code for 
anything newer than 5.1 in spite of <dev-lang/lua-5.3 having been EOLed, 
in part because dev-lang/luajit having never reached compatibility with 
even the 5.2 API".

Not that it changes any of my conclusions, IMHO.

>> Two, more importantly, making LuaJIT the only available implementation
>> of the 5.1 API would severely cripple Lua support on alpha, hppa, ia64,
>> riscv, s390 and sparc (which have all got keywords on dev-lang/lua:5.1
>> but are not supported by LuaJIT at all) as well as force arm64 and
>> ppc64le users to use a 2.1-beta version. This I am afraid might be the
>> deal breaker, as I honestly cannot imagine Gentoo suddenly implementing
>> support for all those arches.
> 
> Some of the arches you listed are not stable, so I don't think we have
> to worry about those arches (see arches.desc). If the arch isn't stable,
> we can't guarantee anything.

I am pretty sure that the ~arch status does NOT give us the right to 
de-keyword packages en masse.

> There is activity in luajit upstream, so hopefully they will do a new
> release that supports the newer lua versions. I do agree that it is
> problematic that they only support lua 5.1.

I really do hope Mike Pall (i.e. LuaJIT upstream) will eventually 
release stable 2.1 - but between how long it has been since the latest 
beta and that he responds with something between impatience and 
hostility to any requests for a new release, LuaJIT has to me been 
looking more and more like one of those artisanal projects (not 
necessarily software ones) whose creators chip at them in perpetuity 
without ever reaching the state worthy of being considered finished.

-- 
Marecki


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