[rollcat]

Don't get me wrong, I love Python, and I've been a user since the 2.4 days. You brought up plenty of good reasons to use it - and my own rule of thumb is to rewrite a shell script in Python once it goes past 100 lines.

My point is that Lua-the-language provides similar expressive power to Python-the-language (including basic stuff like lookup tables), while remaining smaller and simpler to understand than the POSIX shell. It's also simpler to vendor than Python, and you probably want to vendor this kind of stuff to avoid the pain of bootstrapping / circular dependencies.

Now I haven't built a build/packaging system like xbps or apk (few people did), but I've been in charge of devops/releng at work for a decade - and if I learned anything at all, it's that it's better to start with the simplest tool that can do the job, and slowly add what you need. E.g. I wrote a tool in 2016 to replace Ansible in my team, and all of this time it's just been doing its job: <https://github.com/rollcat/judo>. Turned out nobody actually needed the kitchen sink.

[q66]

note: i've been doing lua for two decades and am well familiar with the language itself as well as its inner workings (far less so with python), and i've been building distro tooling for almost as long, and no, definitely not

[rollcat]

I do enjoy Lua, what I miss the most is a more complete and direct interface to POSIX - possibly as a compile-time option, to accommodate the existing embedded use cases.

What would you say is its biggest shortcoming?