Installing "markdown.sile" on WSL

[celtic-coder]

Hi Didier (@Omikhleia),

In the past few days, I've been working on installing both the SILE Typesetter and "markdown.sile" in the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Through trial and error, I was finally able to get it installed in Ubuntu by working through the following steps. I would be interested to know if I just got it working by accident, or might there be a better way of doing this?

In Section 2.7 of the SILE manual (Installing third-party packages), it mentions checking the version of Lua that SILE uses, so that Luarocks will install the correct version. Since I wanted to install locally, I used:

luarocks --lua-version 5.2 install --dev markdown.sile

However, there were problems downloading the "rockspec" file, so I did it manually using:

wget https://luarocks.org/dev/markdown.sile-dev-1.rockspec

I then tried this command, but it gave an error about Lua header files:

luarocks install --dev --local markdown.sile-dev-1.rockspec

Cloning into 'markdown.sile'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 722, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (211/211), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (119/119), done.
remote: Total 722 (delta 106), reused 175 (delta 88), pack-reused 511
Receiving objects: 100% (722/722), 527.47 KiB | 2.14 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (364/364), done.

Error: Failed finding Lua header files. You may need to install them or configure LUA_INCDIR.

The article Error: Failed finding Lua header files. You may need to install them or configure LUA_INCDIR. - Windows 10 with Lua distribution, mentioned that Luarocks could not find "lua.h", "lualib.h" and other related files.

To find these on my system, I installed locate (sudo apt install locate -y) and updated the database (sudo updatedb --prunepaths='/mnt') and then updated the LUA_INCDIR as follows:

luarocks-5.2 config variables.LUA_INCDIR /usr/include/lua5.1 --local

However, the installation still failed. Running the Luarocks command by itself (luarocks) to get the configuration information, was showing the same error for the "include" directory, even though the folder existed and "lua.h" was present:

LUA_INCDIR : (not found)

I installed Lua 5.2 (sudo apt install lua5.2), but this did not create any further "include" folders. The article Lua 5.3 is installed, but I can't locate the correct lua.h, however, gave a pointer in the correct direction.

I installed liblua5.2-dev and updated the "locate" database:

sudo apt install liblua5.2-dev
sudo updatedb --prunepaths='/mnt'

and then checked for further "include" folders:

locate include | grep lua

This gave the following:

/usr/include/lua5.1
/usr/include/lua5.1/lauxlib.h
/usr/include/lua5.1/lua.h
....
/usr/include/lua5.2
/usr/include/lua5.2/lauxlib.h
/usr/include/lua5.2/lua.h
....

Updating the LUA_INCDIR (luarocks config variables.LUA_INCDIR "/usr/include/lua5.2" --local) gave the following configuration, with the "include" directory finally being recognised:

Lua:
   Version    : 5.2
   Interpreter: /usr/bin/lua5.2 (ok)
   LUA_DIR    : /usr (ok)
   LUA_BINDIR : /usr/bin (ok)
   LUA_INCDIR : /usr/include/lua5.2 (ok)
   LUA_LIBDIR : /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu (ok)

This allowed the installation to work correctly (luarocks-5.2 install --dev --local markdown.sile-dev-1.rockspec):

Cloning into 'markdown.sile'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 722, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (211/211), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (119/119), done.
remote: Total 722 (delta 106), reused 175 (delta 88), pack-reused 511
Receiving objects: 100% (722/722), 527.47 KiB | 1.70 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (364/364), done.
Missing dependencies for markdown.sile dev-1:
   embedders.sile (not installed)
   labelrefs.sile (not installed)
   ptable.sile (not installed)
   smartquotes.sile (not installed)
   textsubsuper.sile (not installed)

markdown.sile dev-1 depends on lua >= 5.1 (5.2-1 provided by VM)
markdown.sile dev-1 depends on embedders.sile (not installed)
Installing https://luarocks.org/dev/embedders.sile-dev-1.rockspec
....
....
markdown.sile dev-1 depends on textsubsuper.sile (not installed)
Installing https://luarocks.org/dev/textsubsuper.sile-dev-1.rockspec
Cloning into 'textsubsuper.sile'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 56, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (56/56), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (32/32), done.
remote: Total 56 (delta 23), reused 42 (delta 15), pack-reused 0
Receiving objects: 100% (56/56), 47.15 KiB | 928.00 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (23/23), done.

textsubsuper.sile dev-1 depends on lua >= 5.1 (5.2-1 provided by VM)
textsubsuper.sile dev-1 is now installed in /home/<user>/.luarocks (license: MIT)

markdown.sile dev-1 is now installed in /home/<user>/.luarocks (license: MIT)

As I said, this was trial-and-error over several days. I wasn't always consistent with the commands and the Lua versions that I used, so I may have been giving myself extra work to get it installed locally.

Some final questions: might there have been some checks that I could have run earlier to find out what was missing? Since I am not familiar with the dependencies between Lua versions, or much about the Lua ecosystem, are there some assumptions that needed to be corrected?

Kind Regards,
Liam

[Omikhleia]

Greetings @celtic-coder
I'm afraid I cannot help much here and that it goes beyond what I can do here. I don't have a Windows 10 machine to tinker with WSL, but I once had something similar though (i.e. complaints on missing files) on a regular native Ubuntu system which had Lua 5.2 installed, but an older version of luarocks that was only looking for Lua 5.1... I think I upgraded the system and rebuilt_ luarocks by myself to get it working, though I can't recollect my exact steps... I've no idea why there was such a discrepancy in the first place.

[celtic-coder]

Hi Didier (@Omikhleia),

You have put a huge amount of work into the SILE packages. I was not expecting that you would put any extra work into trying to sort out a particular WSL or Ubuntu problem. I was just hoping that you might have come across something like this in the past, and that you could share from your expertise.

In any case, it was a good learning experience for me. Both personally and professionally, my main platform has been Windows, with occasional stints on Linux. I had expectations that everything would work "out of the box", and so trying to figure out the "development" environment was useful.

Yes, there seems to be a problem involving the version of "luarocks" in combination with the default Lua installation on the vanilla Ubuntu provided on WSL. Thankfully, I didn't have to rebuild "luarocks" like you did, but I at least now have a complete installation of "markdown.sile".

In any case, I trust that what I have written might help some other user who may have a problem with WSL.

Thanks for your help! I am going to close this issue.

Kind Regards,
Liam

[Omikhleia]

In any case, I trust that what I have written might help some other user who may have a problem with WSL.

Moving the issue to Discussions / Q&A - It might indeed be helpful for other users that could hit a similar situation.