Lua package paths are not instantiated sanely at build time via cmake

[alerque]

The new Lua config features are awesome and I'm having a lot more fun getting things setup properly. As a multi-decades user of Awesome I feel like I've found my way home!

That being said there are currently a lot of "paper cuts" involved — things that could be smoothed over for a smother user experience, especially integrating with the rest of the system.

As the Arch Linux package maintainer, I was just looking into cleaning up one issue but don't see a way to do it. The Cmake config looks at the pkg-config data for the system Lua installation and uses it to build against the right Lua headers, but it doesn't take advantage of some of the variables provided.

Notably in a running instance of Hyprland neither the package.path and package.cpath really make sense. Having the Hyprland config directory in the package.path absolutely makes sense and having it first in the search path makes sense. I'm not sold on it being the only thing in the search path. That should really include (at a lower priority than the internal paths) the default system package.path. The package.cpath does include some system paths, but is also not a match for where the system might install C modules by default and includes a hard coded loader from /usr/local that doesn't seem to make sense.

The correct paths are available in the PkgConfig file or can be derived from calling the system lua binary. Or the build system could just have an option to set these directly at build time. But having bogus paths is just a bad paper cut.

[Dregu]

At least this works, but standard distro packages are very much supposed to be supported, so they should be made work by default...

package.path = '/usr/share/lua/' .. _VERSION:sub(5) .. '/?.lua;/usr/share/lua/' .. _VERSION:sub(5) .. '/?/init.lua;' .. package.path
posix = require 'posix'

[alerque]

Yes I know I can hack it together for my user config, but I am the maintainer for the Arch Linux packages and I was hoping to fix this properly at the distro level and the build configuration doesn't seem to have a way to fix this properly.

Also note your hack is backwards from what I would expect: the Hyprland set config directory should be first in the search path with fallback to the system location, not the other way around.

[Dregu]

This is actually the way I wanted it, as I have no intention of putting a module called posix (for example) in my own config dir, but if I accidentally did, I wouldn't want it to break the real package. But this was pretty clearly the opposite of a recommendation everyone should do anyway, so it doesn't matter...

[alerque]

Sure in your own config you're welcome to do it that way, I just have my distro hat on and the typical expectation for this sort of things is app or project specific paths first, then user, then system.

[vaxerski]

I don't know if doing them at comptime is perfect. For example on nix, it makes much more sense to derive them from env.

[vaxerski]

does #15622 work?

[alerque]

No that did not work. For testing I rebuilt the Arch Linux package with that PR applied as a backport. The result shows the same path output before and after:

# These ran before updating to patched package

$ hyprctl repl 'print(package.path)'
/home/caleb/.config/hypr/?.lua;/home/caleb/.config/hypr/?/init.lua

$ lua -e 'print(package.path)'
/usr/local/share/lua/5.5/?.lua;/usr/local/share/lua/5.5/?/init.lua;/usr/share/lua/5.5/?.lua;/usr/share/lua/5.5/?/init.lua;/usr/local/lib/lua/5.5/?.lua;/usr/local/lib/lua/5.5/?/init.lua;/usr/lib/lua/5.5/?.lua;/usr/lib/lua/5.5/?/init.lua;./?.lua;./?/init.lua

# This ran after updating to patched package
$ hyprctl repl 'print(package.path)'
/home/caleb/.config/hypr/?.lua;/home/caleb/.config/hypr/?/init.lua

[alerque]

Um hold on I might be nuking the path in my user config now, standby.

[alerque]

So yes, my testing was off: hyprland reload got rid of the override in my user config, but I had not restarted the binary. Having done that now this does look right!

$ hyprctl repl 'print(package.path)'
/home/caleb/.config/hypr/?.lua;/home/caleb/.config/hypr/?/init.lua;/usr/local/share/lua/5.5/?.lua;/usr/local/share/lua/5.5/?/init.lua;/usr/share/lua/5.5/?.lua;/usr/share/lua/5.5/?/init.lua;/usr/local/lib/lua/5.5/?.lua;/usr/local/lib/lua/5.5/?/init.lua;/usr/lib/lua/5.5/?.lua;/usr/lib/lua/5.5/?/init.lua;./?.lua;./?/init.lua

[vaxerski]

tnx