Compiling Lua - create .so files?

Question

I am compiling Lua 5.2.3 on Centos 6.5, and the compilation / install works fine.

However, I also need the development libraries for another program to compile. I would usually install these by doing this :

yum install lua-devel

Problem is that installs the Lua 5.1 shared libraries, not the 5.2.3 ones.

I could just run with Lua 5.1 from the Centos repo, but if it's a simple-ish thing (for someone who knows) to make the latest version work then I'd be grateful for someone showing me the way. For me the Linux makefiles are still a little bit er, well, you know...

EDIT

I found this site - http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2006-10/msg00091.html - from a long time ago which suggested some changes to the makefiles, but I get this when i run them now :

gcc -fPIC -o liblua.so -shared lapi.o lcode.o lctype.o ldebug.o ldo.o ldump.o 
lfunc.o lgc.o llex.o lmem.o lobject.o lopcodes.o lparser.o lstate.o lstring.o ltable.o 
ltm.o lundump.o lvm.o lzio.o lauxlib.o lbaselib.o lbitlib.o lcorolib.o ldblib.o 
liolib.o lmathlib.o loslib.o lstrlib.o ltablib.o loadlib.o linit.o
/usr/bin/ld: lapi.o: relocation R_X86_64_32 against `luaO_nilobject_' can not be used 
when making a shared object; recompile with -fPIC

noting that I added the -fPIC in a futile gesture; that wasn't suggested in the link just hinted at in the error.

EDIT 2 - SOLUTION

Ok, whilst I'd found this mod myself originally, it was catwell's assurance that it worked that led me to persevere. Here's what I did...

From catwell's link I manually edited the Makefiles. It's easy enough to follow (and as catwell suggests, ignore the luaconf.h mods).

The missing link is to change the following line :

src/Makefile
------------
CFLAGS= -O2 -Wall -DLUA_COMPAT_ALL $(SYSCFLAGS) $(MYCFLAGS) -fPIC

You are adding the -fPIC to the end.

Seems to work fine now.

Thanks to Etan, but I'm accepting catwell's answer as it led most directly to the solution.

Answer 1

Look how Arch Linux does it. You should not touch LUA_ROOT but the rest of the patch is good and relatively simple to understand.

Don't forget to add -fPIC to the CFLAGS too (the Arch package does it here).

Answer 2

The lua team does not include support for shared libraries by default because doing so in a portable manner is not simple. If you get the srpm for lua from CentOS you should be able to find within it the modifications they make to the lua build process to generate the shared objects that they package and ship. CentOS srpm's live on vault.centos.org.