Luau

The Luau repository file now supports pre-definition of mirrors through the use of the <mirror-list> tag, so that one no longer needs to relist every mirror a file release is available on whenever a new software version is released. Mirror URLs can also be specified for a group of packages using the new "mirror-url" attribute with the new <package-group> tag. Other attributes, such as size, filename, package type, and MD5 sum can also be specified for several files at once using the <package-group> tag. In addition, many memory leaks and other minor bugs were fixed.

This is an incremental release, with just a few bugfixes and
preliminary support for the coming updates to the XML
format. Specifically, systems without the GNU extension
function get_current_dir_name are now provided a
replacement function to support them. XML comments are
now recognized and ignored. Finally, unrecognized XML tags
now result in a debugging message rather than an error
message. The public API has not changed.

In this release, the XML repository format has been updated once again to include meta-data about the program it describes. This allows luau-register (with the addition of the "--from-file" and "--from-url" options) to be fed in a Luau repository file and automatically register it with the Luau database. The date format has also been updated to conform with the ISO-8601 format; that is, they are now specified as "YYYY-MM-DD" instead of "MM/DD/YYYY". Finally, the error output facility has been redesigned to work with GLib's error output framework.

The XML format has been reworked in this release to accommodate changes in the focus of the project -- specifically, to act more as a "software repository" than just an updates database. The new XML example file is available at the Web site, and a "luau-repository" DTD has been made to describe the new format.

This release features new support for threading via the gthreads library (which is part of glib). It separates the database support from the base library (libuau) into a new library (libuau-db). The significance of this is that programs only relying on libuau will no longer have to depend also on libdb, which had some compatibility problems when distributing binaries. You also have the choice of only installing libuau, and thus not installing any of the databases or database support, but this is not recommended. There have also been several bugfixes.