Don't use Globals

[daurnimator]

Well behaved lua modules should not set globals; Please fix lqt so it no longer does.

For compatability, older apps can:

local function shallowcopy ( dst , ... ) for i , src in ipairs({...}) do for k , v in pairs ( src ) do dst [ k ] = v end end return dst end

local Qt = shallowcopy ( {} , require"qtcore" , require"qtgui" , ) setmetatable(_G,{__index=Qt} )

[mkottman]

This is on my (private) TODO list, for Lua 5.2 - introduce a loader module, which will handle dependencies and be used to import the real libraries.

I imagine something along these lines:

local core, gui, network, xml = require 'lqt' {'core', 'gui', 'network', 'xml'}

Or if you want them global (I do not consider Qt a "module", but a "framework", therefore globals are fine for my application), something like this:

require 'lqt':import{'core', 'gui'} -- this will bring everything in 'core' and 'gui' to _ENV

Saner proposals are welcome :)

[daurnimator]

Why not just: local qt = require"qt" qt.load("core") qt.load("gui")

accept a vararg as well: qt.load("core","gui","network" )

For the import thing; tell the user to just use: setmetatable(_G,{__index=qt})

[mkottman]

In my opinion, qt:import() is easier to read/understand than setmetatable(_G,{__index=qt}) for those users, who do not know Lua yet (but want to use Lqt). Of course, it would do just that.

Also, there is a question of whether to put all classes into one module qt, or separate them into separate qtcore, qtgui, ...

[daurnimator]

You can easily have one loader dll: "qt" and it has the load function that operates as above. and (eg) qtcore just gets passed a table: and it loads all it's classes into it. Other modules would obviously tell the loader dll if they have dependancies (which it would then resolve).

[daurnimator]

Also i'm not sure about the import.... setting an __index on the global environment isn't a normal thing to do and SHOULD look out of place/strange ==> only 1 module can do it in your whole application.

For users that don't know lua yet; they can use it as boilerplate: and later when they want to learn more: they can figure out what it does/means.