[tlbuild] Stripping the luatex binary

[Taco Hoekwater]

On 04/08/2011 12:03 PM, Philipp Stephani wrote:
>
> Am 08.04.2011 um 10:46 schrieb Taco Hoekwater:
>
>>
>> Best wishes,
>>
>>>
>>> Yes, requiring a library to call external functions in a program seems to be uncommon on all systems, and is totally unsupported on Windows. That's why Lua uses a shared library instead on Windows, and I think it should do so on OS X, too.
>>
>> That is planned for next year's luatex.
>
> Do you know whether that requires recompilation of the extension modules? That is, could LuaTeX still load traditional extension modules that don't link against the shared LuaTeX library?

I could enable luatex to allow use without recompilations in theory, but 
it would only work for trivial modules, not for more complicated ones 
like gui interfaces. There are small differences between our lua and the 
stock lua that make such modules fail unless they are built against our 
own version of lua (that is even true today). Because of that, I would 
actually prefer to create a lua library that is specific to luatex.

Sure having to recompile can be annoying, but 100% reliability is much 
easier on the maintenance side. Once luatex has been altered this way 
(next year, as said) I am positive that some people will start creating 
pre-built packages for luatex that will then appear on tlcontrib and 
eventually perhaps even in texlive itself.

Best wishes,

Taco