On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 11:06 AM, Moritz Wilhelmy <[email protected]> wrote:
> FreeBSD has fetch, NetBSD's tnftp supports downloading via http and ftp. You
> could default to these when installing luarocks on the respective system.

Actually, the standard LuaRocks configure will detect and use fetch.

> Also note that the BSD implementation of tar supports a wider range of formats
> (because it's a frontend to BSD's libarchive) and can extract zip archives 
> just
> fine

OK, that's fine; it's just that LuaRocks currently has a unzip
dependency which could be generalized (for instance, on Windows
everything is done with 7zip)

> Also note that GNU make is fairly portable (and as you already pointed out,
> available on the BSDs as 'gmake')

Yes, at first I did not understand why LuaRocks defaulted to 'gmake'
and not the local make, but then I noticed that some pretty simple
makefiles (e.g. md5) require GNU features. It's overkill, and as you
say, the problem is mostly non-portable makefiles.

>> At least it has a package manager!
>
> Come on...

Was I complaining?  I found the FreeBSD package manager easy to use
after a few tries.  The comment is about certain popular operating
systems which don't have such a nice feature.

> Not at all. In fact, lua installed via "make install" lands there as well. BSD
> separates between base system and 3rd-party software. I'd assume you'd have
> read about it before running into it?

Of course these strategies are up to the OS packagers. Debian uses
/usr/include/lua5.1. I am not at all bothered by such differences;
that's why there is a configure script.  Perhaps you think I was
complaining about FreeBSD being 'different' but I'm sufficiently
grown-up to know that Linux is not Unix (in fact, strictly speaking it
isn't, unlike OS X)

> I disagree. Makefiles are not the problem, unportable Makefiles are.

For a definition of 'portable' that means 'works on anything that
looks like Unix'.

> And it will always be. You can never be sure if tcl/tcl.h is really provided 
> by
> Tcl and if /usr/bin/perl really is perl.

Fair enough. But the idea is to capture the common patterns. I admit
that it takes LR out of its well-defined mission to deliver working
Lua modules, but I am curious about how this process can be improved.

steve d.

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