LuaRocks 2.0 is still using LuaForge as its default repository for rocks, and LuaForge’s FTP access is offline for the time being, which means that no rocks can be updated or added. Version 2.0.1 will have a new default repository that should be much more stable and also easier to update using the new luarocks-admin add command.
What does this have to do with the title of this post? This week I have made new releases of three Kepler libraries that had unreleased commits: Xavante 2.1.0, LuaFileSystem 1.5.0, and Rings 1.2.3. Rockspecs for these new releases are at the new repository only, so I am waiting until LuaRocks 2.0.1 before announcing them on the mail channels. The updated documentation pages have also been moved to Github, as the links above show.
The updates are pretty minor, so even those who have proactively updated their LuaRocks’ config files to use the new repository and are already getting the new packages shouldn’t be worried. Rings 1.2.3 is a strictly bugfix release, correcting a minor bug. Xavante 2.1.0 is also mostly a fix to a security bug in xavante.filehandler that let you request files outside of the document root, but also adds a new parameter to xavante.cgiluahandler that restores the old CGILua behavior of using a new Lua state for each request, as there are old CGILua scripts that depend on this “feature”.
LuaFileSystem 1.5.0 is the one with the most changes, but it is backward compatible with 1.4.2. The first new feature is more control over the lfs.dir iterator, adding next and close methods to control the iteration explicitly (instead of only through a for loop). A simple example that lists all files in the current directory up to a file named foo:
The other feature added to LuaFileSystem 1.5.0 is directory locking via lfs.lock_dir. This function takes a path and atomically checks if a lock file exists in that path and creates one if it does not exist. In this case it returns a lock object that has a free method. If the path is already locked it returns nil and the “File exists” message. These locks can be used as a crude mutex that is portable and works both intra and inter-process. Versium uses this to guarantee that two Versium nodes are not being updated at the same time.
And one more thing: the new LuaRocks repository also has a rock for LuaSQL SQLite3 2.2.0, the SQLite3. This is even more of a stealth release as the other ones, as it is possible that LuaSQL 2.2.0 will be phased out in favor of splitting LuaSQL and letting the version numbers of the drivers diverge. I also have got SQLite and MySQL drivers in the pipeline and should release them shortly. These are the same drivers that have been available from the rocks-cvs repository for some time. I hope releasing them in the main repository will give them more visibility.