lua 5.2

[Alek Paunov]

On 12.05.2013 00:10, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> FWIW the libguestfs transition to Lua 5.2 (done by the SuSE guys)
> wasn't completely straightforward.  A handful of APIs have been
> removed or changed.  These are the changes we had to make:
>
> https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/commit/e987c038ead0a2398f13727ab1de518a216a1d50
> https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/commit/f07e89c5f90a1cef8e61428f30916d39ab35541b
>

As many of Fedora developers know, LuaJIT [1] is a drop-in replacement 
of Lua 5.1. The author Mike Pall stays on his strong opinion to not 
upgrade the LuaJIT implementation of the language to 5.2 standard in the 
foreseeable future. His basic stand point is about keeping compatibility 
for the existing users.

[1] http://luajit.org/performance_x86.html

So, may be Fedora transition to 5.2 is the right moment for LuaJIT to be 
finally included in the collection (with an additional role as 
lua51-compat package - alternative provider of lua(abi) = 5.1 on all 
architectures except s390 and ppc64).

Initially, back in the LuaJIT 2.0 beta times, there was one failed 
packaging attempt [2] who died due to disappeared candidate packager.

[2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=718681

Meanwhile, after 2 years intensive beta period LuaJIT reached official 
2.0 release (2012-11-12). Current version is 2.0.1-2 and 2.1 (with 
compiled string operations) is on the way - [3] (mirror).

[3] http://repo.or.cz/git-browser/by-commit.html?r=luajit-2.0.git

Personally, I not have learned all of the guidelines yet and do not feel 
ready to make proper reviews of other packages ( besides my recent hard 
times with bunch of stalled tasks :-( ), but there are another 
unofficial spec [4] and if Craig is willing to become leading maintainer 
I will be happy to apply as co-maintainer (not because package requires 
additional care, but as help with the bugs processing duties, if any). 
@Craig what you think?

[4] https://github.com/craigbarnes/packages/blob/master/luajit.spec

As a side note, LuaJIT extends Lua language with an unique FFI mechanism 
for direct leveraging the whole treasure of the collection provided 
C-APIs, coded as simple as [5] (compiled to native calls, without need 
of libffi or such), which makes it perfect for standalone 
system-scripting tool and/or Python companion [6].

[5] http://luajit.org/ext_ffi_tutorial.html#zlib
[6] https://github.com/scoder/lupa

Kind Regards,
Alek