Re: [Bug-zile] Re: zile-2.4.0alpha1 released [alpha]

[Reuben Thomas]

On 1 April 2011 19:54, Ulrich Mueller <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> From a distro point of view, this will considerably increase Zile's
> footprint: A 2.3.23 installation requires 270 kB of disk space on an
> amd64 system, whereas for Zile plus Lua it will be about 1.5 MB.

In Debian/Ubuntu, the lua5.1 package, which provides the interpreter,
which is all that Zile needs of Lua, is 315kb uncompressed.
liblua5.1-rex-posix0 (there's no rex-gnu yet is 90.1kb, and
liblua5.1-posix1 is 94.2kb; liblua5.1-bitop0 is 73.7kb and there's no
package of lcurses, but let's allow another 100kb for a total of
673kb.

I plan to replace the C bindings by Lua bindings using alien (the
libffi binding to Lua, not the package converter), which should reduce
these numbers. But realistically, since a Lua binary is about the same
size as Zile (on my system, 145kb for Lua, 196Kb for Zile), it's not
realistically going to be smaller in Lua, especially in disk
consumption, without special measures. I prefer to leave those to
packagers, since I think it's healthier to install uncompressed
sources than pre-compiled Lua, but obviously distributions have a wide
range of options.

I note that tomsrtbt, the self-described "most GNU/Linux on 1 floppy
disk", is entirely Lua-based, so clearly gets quite a lot other than
Lua into less than 1.5Mb.

> Gentoo currently includes Zile with its minimal install media, but I'm
> not sure if I can convince our release engineering team that in future
> they should also include Lua.

I'm going to be trying to give them several more reasons.

> Will there be continued support for the C version?

I'll fix bugs at least until I declare the Lua branch stable, but that
should be a matter of months now, not years. After that it will depend
on a combination of uptake and my personal interest. I've put a lot of
work into the C version over the last few years, but very little of it
was necessary, and it has only served to make Zile gradually more and
more low-maintenance, so it wouldn't be a lot of work for someone to
take over the C branch.

> Could you indicate what other packages are needed as prerequisites?

I just checked the list in INSTALL, and I missed out luabitop (sorry)
but the list is otherwise complete. I notice that there are rather a
lot of packages with similar names (you appear to have been misled by
luancurses and luabit) so I shall add URLs to INSTALL for clarity. It
looks to me as though your main problem is luancurses; you should be
using lcurses, as specified in INSTALL.

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