Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Dropping dev-lang/lua:5.2

[Marek Szuba]

On 2021-07-09 17:34, William Hubbs wrote:

>>> Actually upstream does say when they will stop supporting each version
>>> [1].
>>
>> Um, where? Because I've looked at this page before, I've looked at it
>> again just now and I all can see there is that there will be no further
>> releases of Lua versions up to and including 5.2, and that there will
>> *probably* be no more 5.3 releases. No official End of Life statements,
>> no EOL timeline, and 5.3 is apparently both dead and alive at the same
>> time - which is fine for cats but not so for software.
>
> I guess it is a matter of interpretation then, "there will be no further
> releases" means end of life, to me anyway.

Okay, in that case everyone who interprets this as Lua 5.1 having 
officially been EOLed can substitute the relevant part of the first 
sentence of my RFC with "the Lua ecosystem is a bloody nightmare because 
new versions regularly introduce API incompatibilities and a lot of 
application developers have never bothered to update their Lua code for 
anything newer than 5.1 in spite of <dev-lang/lua-5.3 having been EOLed, 
in part because dev-lang/luajit having never reached compatibility with 
even the 5.2 API".

Not that it changes any of my conclusions, IMHO.

>> Two, more importantly, making LuaJIT the only available implementation
>> of the 5.1 API would severely cripple Lua support on alpha, hppa, ia64,
>> riscv, s390 and sparc (which have all got keywords on dev-lang/lua:5.1
>> but are not supported by LuaJIT at all) as well as force arm64 and
>> ppc64le users to use a 2.1-beta version. This I am afraid might be the
>> deal breaker, as I honestly cannot imagine Gentoo suddenly implementing
>> support for all those arches.
>
> Some of the arches you listed are not stable, so I don't think we have
> to worry about those arches (see arches.desc). If the arch isn't stable,
> we can't guarantee anything.

I am pretty sure that the ~arch status does NOT give us the right to 
de-keyword packages en masse.

> There is activity in luajit upstream, so hopefully they will do a new
> release that supports the newer lua versions. I do agree that it is
> problematic that they only support lua 5.1.

I really do hope Mike Pall (i.e. LuaJIT upstream) will eventually 
release stable 2.1 - but between how long it has been since the latest 
beta and that he responds with something between impatience and 
hostility to any requests for a new release, LuaJIT has to me been 
looking more and more like one of those artisanal projects (not 
necessarily software ones) whose creators chip at them in perpetuity 
without ever reaching the state worthy of being considered finished.

-- 
Marecki