[ANN] Slingshot 8.0.0 released

A framework for automatic rockspecs creation and simplified release thereof.

I am happy to announce release 8.0.0 of Slingshot.

Slingshot's home page is at http://github.com/gvvaughan/slingshot

With this release slingshot is moving to semantic versioning. Among many, many incremental improvements to the release process and integration with Travis CI, this release also supports Lua 5.3, thus enabling support for Lua 5.3 from the rest of my Lua projects.

The recommended way to use Slingshot is as a git submodule tracking the slingshot repository, so these releases are not really designed to be dropped in (though there's no technical reason that would prevent it from working that way), and are more for the purposes of keeping track of what features and changes are being made.

Noteworthy changes in release 8.0.0 (2014-12-31) [stable]

New Features:

• Libtool built Lua modules should be appended to luaexec_LTLIBRARIES, where non LuaRocks users will receive them in the correct directory (likely already in their LUA_CPATH) after sudo make install.

• Slingshot now supports the slack.com Travis Integration. Add a .slackid file to the root of your project, containing your slack token on a single line -- a notification section containing that id will be appended to your .travis.yml at configure time.

• Various build related directories are added to SPECL_ENV by default, so that package.path and package.cpath settings can be set in your spec_helper.lua to enforce loading from the build tree instead of accidentally falling back to the system module paths -- especially during the VPATH make check performed during make distcheck. You might want to write something like this in spec_helper.lua:

      local std = require "specl.std"
  
      local builddir = os.getenv "top_builddir" or "."
      local srcdir = os.getenv "top_srcdir" or "."
  
      package.path = std.package.normalize (
                       top_builddir .. "/lib/mymodule/?.lua",
                       top_srcdir .. "/lib/mymodule/?.lua",
                       package.path)
  
      mymodule = require "mymodule"

  This ensures that, no matter what LuaRocks does to the package paths, nor whether you run specl by hand with auto-discovery, or via the make check or make distcheck rules... by the time you require your module from the development tree, the package path has the right directories at the front.

• Unused libtool .la files for Lua modules are no longer installed.

• Update to latest upstream ax_lua.m4.

• Update to latest upstream bootstrap.

• Travis CI overhaul: Uses latest LuaRocks 2.2.0 with each of Lua 5.3.0(rc2), 5.2.3, 5.1.5 and luajit-2.0.3, only building the Lua version needed in each run. We also run make syntax-check on the CI server after successful tests.

• Instead of overwriting .travis.yml unconditionally, show a warning explaining how to update it when it changes, like bootstrap.

• Markdown format NEWS and announcements.

Incompatible Changes:

• SPECL_ENV is now set (to empty) by default, and should be augmented with += in local.mk.
• SS_CONFIG_TRAVIS is no longer supported. Any additional travis rocks you were passing there should now be listed in a travis_extra_rocks variable in bootstrap.conf instead.

Bug Fixes:

• We no longer assume autotooled installations will put modules in --libdir (although that will continue to work), but also set luaexecdir at install-time for ax_lua.m4 compatibility.
• Version comparison in build-aux/do-release-commit-and-tag now works correctly.
• bootstrap now updates only gnulib and slingshot git submodules as expected.
• Slingshot bootstrap really does perform an automatic out of date check of client bootstrap against latest slingshot submodule bootstrap script now - after updating to this version!

Install it with LuaRocks, using:

luarocks install slingshot 8.0.0