Topic on Extension talk:Scribunto

Why the LUA 5.1 requirement?

6
Tessus (talkcontribs)

I was in the process of trying to install the luasandbox Apache module, but the LUA 5.1 requirement is truly a problem, unless I'm compiling LUA myself. Even on my rather ancient server OS (a few years old), the LUA that comes with it is LUA 5.2. The latest LUA version is 5.3.4. I doubt someone will ever find a LUA 5.1 package on a current distro.

Thus my question: Is there a plan to support newer LUA versions in the future?

Anomie (talkcontribs)
Mr. Stradivarius (talkcontribs)

That's task T178146 in Phabricator, but I don't know if there is a timetable for implementing it. The motivation isn't really there for WMF wikis, as all the modules on the wikis have been written for Lua 5.1.

Tessus (talkcontribs)

Thanks for the info. That pretty much explains it. See, I didn't know that LUA code is not backwards compatible.

Mr. Stradivarius (talkcontribs)

I think the modules on the wikis should be able to run on Lua 5.2 and 5.3, as Scribunto restricts or disables the features (like getfenv and setfenv) that would break on moving from Lua 5.1. It's just the Scribunto extension code itself that needs updating (although that is by no means a small job, especially when you factor in the security review).

Tessus (talkcontribs)

Ok, that explains it even more. I have never looked into the extension code (e.g. I don't know if it was written in C or in Lua, but I always assumed backwards compatibility to a certain point.) I mean I can still compile C code from the 70s. Even APIs are mostly compatible and are phased out via deprecation (e.g. Objective C classes and methods). Therefore I would have never thought that this would be such a challenge. Well, I guess I learned something new.

Thanks again for the explanation.

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