compatiblity of Lua 5.3 prerelease (FWD: [ANN] Lua 5.3.0 (beta) now available)

[Alexander Nasonov <alnsn%yandex.ru@localhost>]

The message below (originally posted on lua-l mailing list) outlines
some changes between beta (work3?) and alpha releases of Lua 5.3.

Some of them are clearly incompatible. This brings a question:
which prerelease version of Lua should be in netbsd7 or even whether
we should hold netbsd7 release until Lua 5.3 is released?

Alex

----- Forwarded message from Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto%inf.puc-rio.br@localhost> -----

Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 11:09:56 -0200
From: Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto%inf.puc-rio.br@localhost>
To: Lua mailing list <lua-l%lists.lua.org@localhost>
Subject: Re: [ANN] Lua 5.3.0 (beta) now available

> 2014-10-23 14:39 GMT+02:00 Paige DePol <lual%serfnet.org@localhost>:
> > On Oct 23, 2014, at 6:13 AM, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo <lhf%tecgraf.puc-rio.br@localhost> wrote:
> >
> >> Lua 5.3.0 (beta) is now available for testing at
> >>       http://www.lua.org/work/lua-5.3.0-beta.tar.gz
> > Thank you for this latest update, Luiz. After this beta will the next release be the final version?
> 
> We had lua-5.2.1 all the way up to rc4 :-)

This was a sad consequence of people paying too little attention to
alpha and beta versions. Most issues that appeared in that long
sequence of release candidates were already present in the alpha
and/or beta versions, but nobody cared to complain (probably because
they did not care to try those versions) before the final version.

It would be very helpful if people really tried this beta version...

BTW, these are the main changes from alpha to beta:

* 'dumpint' and co. replaced by 'string.pack'/'string.unpack'
* new functions 'lua_geti'/'lua_seti'
* 'ipairs' stops at first 'nil'
* 'lua_Ctx' renamed to 'lua_Kcontext'
* %U gets a long (instead of int)
* deprecated 'luaL_checkint'/'luaL_optint'/'luaL_checklong'/'luaL_optlong'
* 'luaL_getmetafield' returns field type
* 'table.copy' -> 'table.move' (plus change in order of parameters)
* 'debug.Csize' removed (subsumed by 'string.pack')
* 'lua_strtonum' -> 'lua_stringtonum'
* change in handling of non-string error messages in lua.c
* ANSI mode turns off 64 bits (as 'long long' is not ANSI)

-- Roberto



----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
Alex