Okay, I'll have a look. What is it used for specifically, tho?
Scripting. Pd-Lua allows you to write your own Pd externals, so you can quickly create your own objects which can do more than what you can do with just Pd (using the full power of a real programming language). You can also do that with C, of course, but Lua is much easier.
Is there
the possibility to make it compatible with newer lua versions upstream
Not sure, you'll have to ask IOhannes. He maintains the earlier version in Debian, and we all know how fast that moves. :)
to have it integrated as a working external depending on LUA version?
My fork should still work with Lua 5.2 as well, Lua 5.1 isn't supported in either version AFAICT (there have been some incompatible changes in the language). I wouldn't want to use anything earlier than Lua 5.2 anyway.
Besides: How stable is the purring data by now? :)
Quite. You might want to package 2.6.0 which has been out for a while, see
https://agraef.github.io/purr-data/. I have a PKGBUILD for the git version in the AUR, it should be easy to adjust this for a stable release. Dependencies galore, though. ;-)
> Also, I recently noticed that Gem (Pd's graphics environment,
> [...]
I agree on the importance, but:
no releases have been made in the last 7(!) years [1].
True. But it's still being used, as it's the recommended way to do both 2D/3D graphics and video with Pd. I'm currently testing a build of Purr Data with Gem based on the latest git, and so far it works fine on Arch for me.
I wouldn't want to build 0.93.3 and would only even consider packaging
this, if proper releases are being made again.
We could politely ask IOhannes (he's the current maintainer) to put out a new release. I'll mail him right away.
Apart from that, we don't really have a naming scheme for pd externals.
Maybe just pd-gem then?
Yep.
Has there ever been a PKGBUILD for it?
I thought so, might be quite some time away, but maybe I'm mistaken. Or maybe it went away after the big AUR4 house-cleaning.