Could be? https://github.com/lua/lua doesn't seem to have an /etc subdirectory and I think that's where I cloned from. Can totally believe the work had already been done by someone else and I failed to find it.
I just did an experiment with Lua 5.4.4; moved the file luac.c to another directory and then executed "gcc *.c -lm -o lua" in the src directory; compiled the vm without an issue, and "./lua" does what expected.