This this like a game where you come up with bullshit and i have to come up with the facts to rectify it? RHEL/centOS have more than 1% market share alone.

Check your own installs and tell me if you find some that dont have liblua or libluajit.

For the library thing: I said "Python and lua are pretty close to that." earlier. I did not say that they have interpreters ready everywhere. But if the language core is already installed on a large fraction of machines, then adding the interpreter is not a big cost.

> already installed on a large fraction of machines

So far you've presented no evidence of this though, just that it's used by a new desktop-focused package.

All linux desktops over the last 30 years is not even a "large fraction" of total Linux installs, much less the ones that have already migrated to this new audio system.

> adding the interpreter is not a big cost

It's nothing to do with cost. It's about "how do I know this will absolutely 100% run on any POSIX machine I throw it on without any extra steps".

Remember the argument here is about something that is claimed to be "objectively better" than Shell. The ubiquitous nature of POSIX shell is a huge barrier for any possible competitor, and saying "well you just need to install it" just defeats the purpose. You might as well write it in fucking java and say "well you just need to install a JVM".

Edit to Add: a good number of systems I manage do have liblua installed... because HAProxy requires it, and those systems have HAProxy installed. Not because it was installed as part of the base OS or even a default group of packages.

Incidentally, HAProxy and thus liblua were installed on those systems by infrastructure management that's implemented as shell script. So what kind of chicken and egg argument do we need to have here about how exactly I can run a Lua script to install Lua?

> a good number of systems I manage do have liblua installed

/thread