I just love messing around with run-time languages that I know relatively little about (and if your sarcasm detector isn’t flashing red about now, take it out and give it a good talking to).
The problem detailed here is something that you are unlikely to encounter unless you get into weird stuff like running an odd-ball window manager, aren’t content with the version of said window manager distributed with your Linux distribution, and are used to re-compiling things from scratch.
It all started when I upgraded Ubuntu on my work machine (to Zesty Zapus). The window manager version was upgraded from 3.5 to 4.0, which broke on my configuration file (3.5); not a big problem I thought, as I had already upgraded my window manager at home to 4.1 and reconfigured the configuration file. I copied the updated configuration file from home into place.
And it failed. Apparently I use 4.1-isms within the file. As I was not happy about tinkering with the file to downgrade it (in a language I know relatively little about), I decided to re-compile Awesome 4.1 instead.
Which failed with a weird error :-
» awesome --version
awesome v4.1 (Technologic)
• Compiled against Lua 5.3.3 (running with Lua 5.3)
• D-Bus support: ✔
• execinfo support: ✔
• xcb-randr version: 1.4
• LGI version: [string "return require('lgi.version')"]:1: module 'lgi.version' not found:
no field package.preload['lgi.version']
no file '/usr/local/share/lua/5.3/lgi/version.lua'
no file '/usr/local/share/lua/5.2/lgi/version.lua'
no file '/usr/local/share/lua/5.3/lgi/version/init.lua'
no file '/usr/local/share/lua/5.2/lgi/version/init.lua'
no file '/usr/local/lib/lua/5.3/lgi/version.lua'
no file '/usr/local/lib/lua/5.3/lgi/version/init.lua'
no file '/usr/share/lua/5.3/lgi/version.lua'
no file '/usr/share/lua/5.3/lgi/version/init.lua'
no file './lgi/version.lua'
no file './lgi/version/init.lua'
no file '/usr/local/lib/lua/5.3/lgi/version.so'
no file '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lua/5.3/lgi/version.so'
no file '/usr/lib/lua/5.3/lgi/version.so'
no file '/usr/local/lib/lua/5.3/loadall.so'
no file './lgi/version.so'
no file '/usr/local/lib/lua/5.3/lgi.so'
no file '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lua/5.3/lgi.so'
no file '/usr/lib/lua/5.3/lgi.so'
no file '/usr/local/lib/lua/5.3/loadall.so'
no file './lgi.so'
Which had me stumped for a while, and it turns out that DuckDuckGo didn’t have an obvious fix (one of the reasons for writing this).
Eventually I figured out that awesome was not finding the LGI module (I can be slow at times) which was odd because it was definitely installed. However it turns out that it was installed in /usr/share/lua/5.2/lgi. So despite having lua 5.3 installed, extra lua modules can only be seen if you have lua 5.2 installed?
The “fix” for this was to create an environment variable telling LUA to search for files in rather more places before starting Awesome :-
export LUA_PATH="/usr/local/share/lua/5.3/?.lua;/usr/local/share/lua/5.2/?.lua;/usr/local/share/lua/5.3/?/init.lua;/usr/local/share/lua/5.2/?/init.lua;/usr/local/lib/lua/5.3/?.lua;/usr/local/lib/lua/5.3/?/init.lua;/usr/share/lua/5.3/?.lua;/usr/share/lua/5.2/?.lua;/usr/share/lua/5.3/?/init.lua;/usr/share/lua/5.2/?/init.lua;./?.lua;./?/init.lua"
This was created by running lua from the command line and running print(package.path) to display the default setting, and adding the 5.2 equivalent for many elements.
As to whether it works or not, well I cannot be sure (I’m not going into work on a weekend just to check if the window manager fires up), but Awesome itself seems happy with the result :-
» awesome --version awesome v4.1 (Technologic) • Compiled against Lua 5.3.3 (running with Lua 5.3) • D-Bus support: ✔ • execinfo support: ✔ • xcb-randr version: 1.4 • LGI version: 0.9.1
So it can find LGI, but whether it can do anything useful with it remains to be seen!
