From Fedora Project Wiki

Lua 5.5

Summary

Update Fedora's Lua interpreter from 5.4 to 5.5.

Owner

Current status

Detailed Description

Lua is one of the critical languages supported in Fedora, notably, because of RPM, but for a variety of other reasons as well. It is lightweight and well maintained. Upstream released 5.5 on December 22, 2025, and we have always kept Fedora on the current revision whenever possible. Its main new features are declarations for global variables, named vararg tables, more compact arrays, and major garbage collections done incrementally.

Feedback

Benefit to Fedora

Fedora has always been considered an excellent platform for lua users, because of our quick adoption of the current lua interpreter, as well as our willingness to aggressively patch for minor releases and known lua bugs fixed in their upstream source. This change would continue that behavior. Additionally, because lua is used in the internals of RPM, we inherit performance improvements through newer lua that benefit RPM, which has a broad impact on Fedora. Changing to lua 5.5 has low impact to end users, the language itself remains mostly compatible with previous revisions. Most of the gains here are in bug and performance fixes.

Scope

  • Proposal owners:

The following dependent packages need to be rebuilt (in a side-tag): ClanLib06 apk-tools aqualung asc asterisk awesome brltty ceph cgit clingo collectd conky corsix-th darktable domoticz dovecot eiskaltdcpp fcitx fennel fillets-ng fityk funguloids geeqie gnuplot golly gpick gplugin grafx2 graphviz grilo-plugins haproxy hexchat highlight httpd ibus-libpinyin ibus-pinyin imapfilter ipe janus libguestfs libinput libloc librime librs232 lighttpd lite-xl lsyncd lua-alt-getopt lua-argparse lua-bit32 lua-cassowary lua-cldr lua-cliargs lua-cosmo lua-coxpcall lua-cqueues lua-cyrussasl lua-dbi lua-epnf lua-ev lua-event lua-expat lua-filesystem lua-fluent lua-inotify lua-json lua-ldap lua-lgi lua-linenoise lua-loadkit lua-lpeg lua-luaossl lua-luarepl lua-luautf8 lua-lunitx lua-luv lua-lxc lua-md5 lua-moonscript lua-mosquitto lua-mpack lua-posix lua-psl lua-readline lua-sec lua-socket lua-sql lua-term lua-timerwheel lua-unbound lua-vstruct lua-zlib luabind luarocks lujavrite lumail lutok lxi-tools mathgl megaglest mle mm3d mod_security monotone nbdkit neomutt opendkim osm2pgsql plplot prosody rpc2 rpm rrdtool scorched3d sile slurm suricata texworks tio tolua++ ucviewer uwsgi vis vlc weechat wireplumber wireshark worker xmake xmoto xournalpp

I expect these packages should rebuild with minimal changes.

  • Other developers:

Barring any significant issues in the above packages, no other developers should be impacted.

  • Release engineering:

This feature should not require coordination with rel-eng, though, we probably want to merge this _before_ the mass rebuild to make sure RPM is intact.

  • Policies and guidelines: N/A (not needed for this Change)
  • Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)
  • Alignment with the Fedora Strategy: Yes, because it keeps Fedora on current lua.

Upgrade/compatibility impact

Should be none.

Early Testing (Optional)

Do you require 'QA Blueprint' support? N

How To Test

All existing lua scripts/scripting should continue to work as is. If not, this is a bug we will address in conjunction with upstream.

User Experience

The user experience should not be affected.

Dependencies

Known dependencies are listed above. We have updated lua in the past and feel confident there are not hidden dependencies.

Contingency Plan

We can keep a lua54 compatibility package (I'm 99% sure we will need one in order to update RPM, but we usually get rid of it before everything lands). We can also rollback to lua 5.4 if we have issues rebuilding the dependencies.

  • Contingency mechanism: (What to do? Who will do it?) I will make a lua54 compatibility package that is generated from the lua package and contains liblua-5.4. Packages unable to migrate can depend on it as long as necessary.
  • Contingency deadline: Beta freeze?
  • Blocks release? Yes, because of RPM. If we get RPM going quickly, this becomes a no.

Documentation

Release Notes

Fedora has updated to Lua 5.5.

Retrieved from "https://fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?title=Changes/Lua5.5&oldid=762322"