On Thu, 20 Nov 2008, Jesse Keating wrote:
On Thu, 2008-11-20 at 14:49 -0500, Colin Walters wrote:
But there's clearly a default, which is shell script. And in
particular bash. In any case do we really want to encourage people
writing their %post scripts in lua or whatever random language they
like? I don't think we do. That will fragment the community of
people who can modify a package.
Actually yes, lua would be a good forced default, since rpm contains an
internal lua interpreter and would need no external deps to process the
script. Of course, regardless of what /language/ the script is written
in, the script could call upon things that are both "core os" utilities,
as well as "applications".
Yup... and with internal Lua, the need for those core os utilities is much
reduced as you can do lots of things directly from Lua, without forking a
single extra process. This is particularly useful for things that happen
very early in the transaction where a shell might not be even installed
yet. Another, perhaps not so obvious advantage of Lua scriptlets is that
syntax errors are caught at build time.
Lua in rpm has been pretty much undocumented and as such largely
misunderstood and dismissed with "well I'm not interested in some oddball
niche programming language." It's not about Lua the language, it's about
the possibilities that having a fairly powerful programming language
embedded in rpm opens up, things that would be completely impossible
otherwise. Beginnings of documentation can be now found here:
http://rpm.org/wiki/PackagerDocs/RpmLua
Enough Lua rant for this morning,
- Panu -
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