Hi everyone!
Lua 5.2 is over a year old by now, and there are still many libraries on
the rocks server that are not yet ported to it. In principle there is
nothing wrong with that, except almost all rockspecs claim compatibility
with Lua 5.1 *and up* ("lua >= 5.1") even if the authors know (and state
e.g. in their readme) that the module is still incompatible with Lua
5.2. It is very annoying to install a rock for Lua 5.2 with a bunch of
dependencies only to discover that some dependency fails to compile (or
even fails later at runtime) because it claimed to be compatible but it
really wasn't. Adding Lua 5.2 support is relatively easy, so I fear the
situation will get worse for Lua 5.3/6.0 ...
I have a rockspec for markdown.lua, which adds support for Lua 5.2 via
an embedded patch (I still need one bug[1] fixed in luarocks before I
can release it). I contacted the original markdown.lua author a few
weeks ago and sent the patch, but haven't received an answer yet.
[1]: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=30742060
I want to start a discussion, what (if anything) can be done to improve
the state of luarocks for Lua 5.2. Is releasing a rockspec that patches
other people's code ok? Should we modify rockspecs fixing the
dependencies of other people's rocks? What should happen to obviously
unmaintained rocks that claim Lua-compatibility to the end of the
universe? What should happen to unmaintained rocks in general? Should
rockspecs with open-ended dependencies be banned altogether?
Philipp
p.s.: Btw., one nice feature of the rocks list[2] would be a means to
filter rocks by supported Lua version (obviously makes no sense as long
as the dependencies are not fixed) and/or OS.
[2]: http://luarocks.org/repositories/rocks/
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