luarocks
Important information missing from the Windows installation instructions.
I was able to get luarocks to work nicely with a self-compiled lua binary under Linux.
However, I can't make sense of the Windows installation instructions.
The first instruction is to get the the latest "win32.zip" from http://luarocks.github.io/luarocks/releases/.
This seems to be the "legacy Windows package" which "includes Lua 5.1". The installation instructions seem to apply to this package. There is also a (confusingly named) "windows-32.zip" which is the "luarocks.exe stand-alone Windows binary". How is one supposed to use this one?
I'm interested in working with Lua 5.3 (and perhaps later with older or newer versions of Lua, or maybe even luajit), and not with Lua 5.1 as bundled in the "legacy Windows package".
There seem to be various binary distributions of Lua 5.3, for example from Lua Builds, or luabinaries. There is also LuaDist which seems to overlap in scope with LuaRocks.
I guess that if I want to use binary modules, I will also need to setup a C compiler such as mingw, or Visual Studio, or does LuaRocks provide precompiled packages?
I'm quite puzzled by this. What are the actual options, and what are the pros and cons?
Since a typical Windows does not come with development tools preinstalled, there are various sources of Lua binaries, and Lua can be compiled directly from source, my guess is that there must be multiple ways to use LuaRocks on Windows. Yet there is no information on the supported combinations and how to configure LuaRocks in each case.
I plan to add luarocks to scoop (a windows package manager) hopefully after resolving some issues with version detection, that would be the easiest way to use. You can install Lua as well from scoop (I will try to make multiple versions of Lua available as well).
https://scoop.sh/
One line PS5+ scoop install:
iwr -useb get.scoop.sh | iex (Note: if you get an error you might need to change the execution policy (i.e. enable Powershell))
As always, for custom set ups or redistribution you might want to build from source or download the binaries from the shown locations, like "luarocks-3.6.0-windows-64.zip" from http://luarocks.github.io/luarocks/releases/.
