On Tue, 11 Dec 2018 at 11:45, Alad Wenter via aur-general <aur-general@archlinux.org> wrote:
1. When I look at LUA modules, I see that most are available on "luarocks", which is apparently a package manager for LUA. Can you leverage this to make more LUA modules available on Arch?
Note that it's "Lua" not LUA. I'd like to leverage luarocks to build lua packages, however it maintains its own local database of installed packages which makes things awkward. I don't want to introduce luarocks as a non-build-time dependency. Follow https://github.com/luarocks/luarocks/issues/671 for possible progress in this area.
2. You have some AUR packages for LUA modules of your own making, yet they hardcode gcc lines instead of using a Makefile. [1] (At least they respect $CFLAGS and $LDFLAGS, I guess.) Why?
The upstream packages do not ship a makefile; they "officially" only support luarocks for building. Due to the above-mentioned issue, I don't see it as feasible to use luarocks for AUR packages at the moment, so I had to hard-code the build commands into the PKGBUILD.
3. I have no idea on what some of your more complicated packages do, or why they would require said complexity, e.g. iup. [2] Perhaps you could explain a bit on that regard.
IUP is a graphical toolkit similar to gtk, qt or wxwidgets with many components. The upstream do not want to support dynamic linking for some pieces, so I need to patch out their (custom) build system 'tecmake'. The release tarballs include lua bindings to the C IUP library; some complexity in the PKGBUILD comes from compiling necessary components for each of lua 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3.
4. Related to the above, there are no current packaging guidelines for LUA packages. [3] Do you plan on starting an effort (possibly with other LUA package maintainers) to remedy this?
Yes :) If anyone would like to help out with this I'm all ears.