Luau - The Lib Update/AutoUpdate Suite
Web Site: http://luau.sourceforge.net
E-Mail: <deklund@fastmail.fm>
Thank you for downloading Luau! If you have any feedback, please contact me, David Eklund, at deklund@fastmail.fm.
First of all, I highly suggest you peruse the Official Luau Whitepaper, distributed with this package under docs/whitepaper.pdf. It will give you a much more thorough introduction to Luau than this document - however, if you just want a quick gaunt over the important stuff, read on:
INSTALLATION
Standard routine. However, you will need a couple outside libraries - specifically:
libcurl
libdb
glib
readline
Most of these are relatively ubiquitous, so hopefully there won't be a problem finding and installing them (you most likely have most if not all already installed).
To get rolling, just follow the standard operating procedure:
./configure [options...]
make
make install
After that, you should be good to go.
WHAT IS LUAU?
Luau is a framework for disseminating software and message updates for software packages through a decentralized approach. Individual software developers provide publically accessible 'updates' files that describe currently available updates, which is then downloaded by the client software and interpreted to see if there's anything new the user should be interested in.
An important caveat to note - since Luau works on a decentralized basis, updates and support for Luau -must- be provided by the individual package maintainer. If this is your first time installing Luau, you will almost certainly find when you run 'luau' or 'luau-x' that there are no updates available because you don't have any Luau registered programs installed (except for Luau itself, which registers itself with itself as a Luau registered program - confusing, huh?). However, as soon as you download and install any programs that support Luau, they should automatically become available in the list of registered programs - and therefore the list of updates which Luau is now capable of receiving.
As the number of project maintainers who support Luau increases, the list of Luau registered and supported programs will also increase. At the time of this release, however, there are very few . If you like the idea of Luau, I highly recommend you ask the maintainers of software projects you use to adopt it.
USING LUAU
There are two utilities provided to you, the user, in order to retrieve these updates. The first - and the one you will most likely be most interested in - is luau-x, which is not provided with this package and must be downloaded separately (see http://luau.sourceforge.net). luau-x is the graphical front-end to Luau and provides the simplest and most fully-featured interface for working with. There is also however the simple console-based application - named simply 'luau' - that will provide you with all the basic functionality you need, if not the same level of usability. Execute 'luau -h' to see the full spectrum of options available to you.
Should you ever need to mess with the internal databases of Luau itself, 'luau-register' will provide you with all the utility you need. It's a relatively simple application (mirroring the relatively simple layout of the databases Luau uses) - simply call 'luau-register -h' for more information.
CONTACT INFORMATION
Project Maintainer and Head Developer
David Eklund
<deklund@fastmail.fm>
Please e-mail me with any bug reports, feature suggestions, or just general comments you have. I'm always open to correspondence.