#2926: New package: Lua
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Reporter: a...@… | Owner: blfs-b...@…
Type: enhancement | Status: new
Priority: normal | Milestone: 6.5
Component: BOOK | Version: SVN
Severity: normal | Keywords:
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About Lua.
Lua was designed as an extension language and because of this is small.
However, this doesn't mean is not rich or it's not expressive (quite the
opposite, especially if you know the roots (1) of Roberto Ierusalimschy
(the main Lua author) which is Scheme.
The Lua project is hosted at http://www.lua.org
Current version is 5.1.4 and it has no dependencies.
The Lua distribution doesn't provide a configure script, so there are just
"make" targets.
To compile Lua we just need to issue, a "make linux" from the top level
from the distribution.
By default the installation goes into the /usr/local hierarchy, so we need
to use the INSTALL_TOP and INSTALL_LIB variables to change that, with
{{{
make install INSTALL_TOP=/usr INSTALL_LIB=/usr/lib
}}}
Lua ships with an etc/lua.pc file, that also needs some fixing
{{{
%s@/local@@
}}}
As a final step we place the .pc file into /usr/lib/pkgconfig with
0644 permissions.
That's it. Using those instructions, here is the package provides
analytically
(not so much as expected)
{{{
/usr/bin/lua
/usr/bin/luac
/usr/include/lua.hpp
/usr/lib/liblua.a
/usr/lib/pkgconfig/lua.pc
/usr/man/man1/lua.1
/usr/man/man1/luac.1
/usr/include/lauxlib.h
/usr/include/lua.h
/usr/include/luaconf.h
/usr/include/lualib.h
}}}
Now. As it has been said already, Lua is tiny and minimalist yet quite
expressive,
so doesn't provides any batteries with it, like the most scripting
languages usually do
today.
To overcome this, the Lua community created many excellent modules (to
complement the Lua core), which they provide specifics functions.
Like a socket interface (2), or luaposix(3) or modules that offering
various bindings, e.g., gui toolkits.
All these modules (usually are hosted at luaforge.net) are not officially
supported.
A module system was implemented, which is the LuaRocks (4).
The purpose of LuaRocks is to (per word) provide a deployment and
management system for Lua modules,
something like cpan or RubyGems.
The current release is in first stable version with minor releases with
bug-fixes.
The LuaRocks team is on a process to a 2.* new stable release, with a big
difference from current stable.
Currently LuaRocks is installed into /usr/share/lua/5.1/luarocks and by
default all the
installed modules goes into /usr/lib/luarocks/rocks hierarchy. The user
then
should include a "include luarocks" on top of the script to start using
the modules.
That is what is going to change. Modules would be installed to the
standard locations,
i.e., LUA_PATH and LUA_CPATH.
Now. The above variables are both paths that Lua is searching for modules.
The first is the LUA_PATH, that e.g., for the 5.1.4 release is
/usr/share/lua/5.1 and the second is
the LUA_CPATH that is /usr/lib/lua/5.1
The simple difference is that in LUA_PATH are located modules which are
just plain text files with a .lua extension, and in the UA_CPATH are
located modules written in C with embedded Lua code (*.so files).
Those two variables can be used in runtime, so the user should know about
their importance.
There is another approach.
Below are vim sunstitutions to src/luaconf.h which we can applying them
before the installation
as the very first step (if I remember well, I've adopted them from a
gentoo patch), where we
are defining where Lua will look for the modules, that means in our case
under /usr/{lib,share}/lua/5.1.
{{{
%...@^#d.\{-}e \(LUA_ROOT\).*@&\r#define \12\t"/usr/"@
%...@^\(#d.*\)\(LUA_LDIR\)\(.*T\)\(.*\)@&\r\1\22\32\4@
%...@^\(#d.*\)\(LUA_CDIR\)\(.*T\)\(.*\)@&\r\1\22\32\4@
%...@^\s*".\{-}\s\(LUA_LDIR\)\(.\{-}\s\)\1\(.*\)\n\(\s*\)@&\12\2\12\3\r\4@
g/\.so;/s/\(.*\)"/\1;" LUA_CDIR2"?.so"/
}}}
So in a conclusion, we have to write an additional page or extend the lua
page (that might add some bloat, though this depends from the
implementation) describing the above and with instructions to:
* install and use LuaRocks
* download and install four/five important and popular Lua modules (I do
have the instructions and I can provide them when needed)
Another thing to know is if we want to build the shared library, liblua.so
or just the static liblua.a. If we need to build the shared library we
should do a research how the other distributions
do build the shared library. There is also a patch written for 5.1.1,
which can still be valid, from Luca Piol in
http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/attachment/ticket/2173/lua-5.1.1-makeso-1.patch
As I am not in a position to build a 6.5 LFS, I can't really do this
ticket, so I would welcome a collaboration from editor(s) that are
interested.
1.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/260022/-z_programming_languages_lua
2. http://luaforge.net/projects/luasocket/
3. http://luaforge.net/projects/luaposix/
4. http://www.luarocks.org/
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Ticket URL: <http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/ticket/2926>
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