Hi all,

Was thinking about Alexander's recent thread about packages that need
uncommon external libraries, and thought about the following problem:
what if the lua extension happened to need more than the public API?

lua-gdb is an example:

http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2008-03/msg00554.html

It's a useful Lua/C debugger for Emacs people, which has the cool
ability to jump from Lua to C code in an extension, and back.

For this, it needs to find out the actual address of the native C
function from the Lua internal structures, and this can only be done
by using some private Lua headers.

Now the only way I could package this as a rockspec is to include the
needed headers, and enforce the Lua version strictly.

Another packaging question about lua-gdb - it uses lexpect, which I've
found very useful in automating things like FTP etc. The best approach
would be to factor out lexpect and make it into a rock, I suppose.
lexpect in turn could be refactored to use Gunnar's lpty, gaining
important functionality like timeout control but losing Windows
functionality altogether.

Apologies for thinking aloud, but how to package useful software can
be surprisingly tricky

steve d.

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