On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 9:53 AM, Gunnar Zötl <[email protected]> wrote:
>>  OR dependencies can be satisfied if at least one of the dependencies in the 
>> given list is satisfied.
>
> This I like. Having this not only for package dependencies but also for 
> external dependencies would solve another pet peeve of mine... like header 
> files being in slightly different locations on differrent systems (think 
> /usr/include/lua.h vs. /usr/include/lua/lua.h)

At least LR does that for us (it's /usr/include/lua5.1 on my Debian
box. The possibilities are endless ;))

But do look at

http://www.luarocks.org/en/Platform-agnostic_external_dependencies

The trouble is that 'Linux' as a platform covers many ways of doing
things, like that state of angry confusion I have dealing with RedHat.
It isn't LR's job to track all these quirks and discrepencies,
although it is the maintainer's job to make sure that the rock can
cope with different systems.

It would be useful if there were alternatives possible:

external_dependencies = {
   FOO = {
      library = "foo"
   }
}

becomes pick-one-of:

external_dependencies = {
   FOO = {
      library = {"foo","mfoo","fakefoo"}
   }
}

and this appropriately setting the FOO variables.

Currently LR puts the burden of discovery on the user, assuming that
user knows best, etc.  It would be nice if a rockspec writer could
provide a nice set of hints when an external dependencies check goes
bad, expressed as a little paragraph which would be shown to the user.
A cute touch would make this hints paragraph subject to per-platform
overrides, so that if the user is on OS X, it will tell them what the
fink package name is plus an URL to go seek manually.  Maintainer has
to work a little harder, but user wastes less time.

steve d.

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