Lua 5.5 and LuaRocks...

[sur-behoffski]

G'day,

Not surprisingly, some Rocks are not compatible with Lua 5.5. I don't
know if there's a program to decide yes/no/maybe on support for
individual rocks.

The list I see is from my habitual use, which closely coincides with
the lglicua package.

The disruption I see is:

- std.normalise [no results matching...]

- std.strict [no results matching...]

- luaposix [dependency luabitop >= 1.0.2 fails...]

- bit32 [no results matching...]

---------------------

Part of the problem is that I've adopted a Lua-5.4-standard preamble,
which strives to allow me to switch between Lua-5.[1234] versions
quite easily, as long as I stay within a conservative subset of the
language features.

> -- Use rocks to (a) Normalize Lua 5.1/5.2/5.3/5.4 differences; and
> -- (b) Do some simple dynamic checking of variable references.
> local _ENV = require("std.normalize"){}
> local strict = require("std.strict")
> _ENV = strict.strict(_ENV)
> if rawget(_G, 'setfenv') ~= nil then -- If 5.1, use careful code.
> setfenv(1, _ENV)
> end

I recognise that the new global/local scoping mechanism, added as part
of Lua 5.5, affects things like std.strict.

---------------------

I require at least luaposix [needs luabitop >= 1.0.2] in order to work.
This is because I try to take a very, very restrictive stance in dealing
with shells and command invocation, trying to avoid "shell-special"
characters that might provide an opportunity for a malicious user to
manipulate a shell into performing unwanted actions.

----

I've been in contact with Hisham over the last couple of months, and he
has been helpful. However, I don't know the best protocol for dealing
with the entire database of Rocks supported by LuaRocks.

--

Thanks for reading this far!

best, b

[Thijs Schreijer]

On Fri, 6 Feb 2026, at 01:08, sur-behoffski wrote:
> G'day,
>
> Not surprisingly, some Rocks are not compatible with Lua 5.5. I don't
> know if there's a program to decide yes/no/maybe on support for
> individual rocks.
>

I checked https://luarocks.org/manifests/gvvaughan/luaposix-36.3-1.rockspec

and it explicitly has a constraint "< 5.5", which makes is non-compatible. I think your best option is to post an issue, or even better a PR, to the individual repositories to ping the respective maintainers.

Thijs