[tlbuild] Stripping the luatex binary

[Peter Breitenlohner]

On Sat, 9 Apr 2011, Taco Hoekwater wrote:

> On 04/08/2011 12:03 PM, Philipp Stephani wrote:
>> 
>> Am 08.04.2011 um 10:46 schrieb Taco Hoekwater:
>> 
>>>> 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.

Hi Taco,

first, can you please clarify: does lua plan to have a shared library for
Unix (I suppose all of them, not just OS X), or do you want to do this just
for luaTeX?  And related: are the current extension modules a general lua
feature or something special for luaTeX?

In either case you should allow for sufficient time to integrate these not
entirely trivial steps into TL.

>> 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.

If shared extension modules and lua library are general lua features, it is
extemely unpleasant to have different versions around (one for lua and one
for luaTeX).  This can only lead to all sorts of confusion and in particular
to library/module search path problems.  The situation would be much worse
than for the modified icu libraries for XeTeX and the stock icu libraries,
because the modified libraries are static archives and never installed.

So my question: are the "small differences" between your lua and the stock
lua really really necessary.

Regards
Peter Breitenlohner <peb at mppmu.mpg.de>