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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