Re: [Plplot-devel] Building fails with Lua version > 5.1

[Andrew R. <and...@us...>]

On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 02:57:44PM -0800, Alan Irwin wrote:
> On 2012-02-11 19:53+0530 Atri wrote:
> 
> > Hi!
> >
> > I package plplot (version 5.9.9) for the Linux distribution openSUSE
> > [1]. I have run into a problem with building plplot for openSUSE's
> > factory (eventually this will become the next openSUSE release): the
> > version of lua in factory is 5.2 [2], but plplot's lua bindings won't
> > build with lua > 5.1. For now I have just disabled the lua bindings for
> > factory. It seems to me that the cmake module for building the lua
> > bindings check explicitly for versions of lua = 5.0 and 5.1. It might be
> > useful to adapt this cmake module to accept any lua version >= 5.0. I
> > have really little knowledge about cmake, but could help out with build
> > testing etc. as the need be.
> 
> Hi Atri:
> 
> Lua-5.2 was released only in December so it will take a while for that
> to propagate to most Linux distros.  For example, Debian is quite
> conservative and only supports Lua-5.0 even in the unstable version
> of Debian for some reason.
> 
> So the bad news is you will be somewhat on your own (i.e., the only
> potential tester of Lua-5.2 with PLplot that I am aware of) for a
> while, but the good news is the CMake build system should be really
> easy to modify so that you can find and attempt to build and test
> PLplot using Lua 5.2.

Hi Atri,

That is not entirely true. Lua5.1 has been in debian for some time (it
is present in lenny (oldstable) which was released several years ago 
now. 

Lua5.2 (or at least a RC of the final release) is available in
Debian experimental, so there is some work going on there. Anyway, 
the point still stands that the core developers don't currently have
easy access to lua 5.2, so you help in testing will be invaluable.

Anyway, in the case of plplot there are two external issues. One is
the cmake support (which you have already encountered and which Alan
has offered some advice on). The other is that the lua bindings are
generated by swig. A quick google search suggests there are issues
with swig and lua 5.2 

http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2011-12/msg00803.html

but it would be good to confirm / refute this with plplot. There is
a patch for swig on sourceforge which you could test

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=3480366&group_id=1645&atid=301645

Do let us know how you get on.

Regards

Andrew