Re: Question about embedded Lua
On Thu, 2019-07-25 at 09:45 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Tobias Frost <tobi@debian.org> writes:
>
> >
> > I think there is another option, as embedding lua is a bad idea for
> > the
> > reason you have already quoted: There are currently two (three with
> > experimental) lua versions available in Debian, so you should run
> > one of
> > those. This is especially true if the to-embedded-library is
> > someting
> > like the caliber of lua.
> I think you may be interpreting this with wrong definition of
> "embed."
> "Embedded Lua" normally means that the compiled program contains or
> links
> with a Lua interpreter and some configuration or plugins can be
> written in
> Lua. I would just read "embed Lua" as "link the program with a Lua
> interpreter."
>
> It doesn't mean that the Lua source code ships with the source of the
> program, or that the program has its own forked copy of Lua. That's
> normally called "vendoring" or something more informal.
>
> The problem is what version of Lua to link with, and how to handle
> upgrades (which are inevitable since option 2 from the original
> message
> isn't viable in the long run; eventually, we're going to remove the
> old
> version of Lua from the archive).
Exactly. If you choose 5.3 now, and backwards compatibility is a core
goal, you're stuck supporting 5.3 for a VERY long time, since 5.4 and
beyond are not backwards compatible. But eventually, perhaps 10 or 20
years from now, Debian is going to drop 5.3, meaning you need an
upgrade path. That upgrade path means simultaneously linking against
two versions of Lua, which isn't feasible unless you mangle the symbol
names.
Kyle
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