[DVIPDFMx] 2010 engine plan

[Karl Berry]

    though it is still api-compatible, it is 100% implementation
    compatible with stock lua.

I assume you mean it is *not* 100% implementation compatible.

    this will only work for as long as luatex's lua api really is
    100% compatible with the stock lua 5.1 dll

Isn't that a highly desirable state of affairs?  It seems to me that it
would be very nice for users to be able to take Lua .dll's from wherever
and just be able to drop them in place and use them with LuaTeX.

One concern that comes to my mind with us providing something named
lua51.dll (whether it's the real one or just a redirection) is the
creation of a conflict/confusion with the original Lua.  I know it can
be resolved technically through search paths, but ...  is this a normal
thing to do on Windows?

    There is just one small problematic thing and that is that -Wl,-E is
    a bit too wild: it exports a great many more symbols than just the ones
    from the lua api. This is fixable (at least for gcc) 

Browsing through the GNU ld documentation, is the "fixable" you mean
using --dynamic-list?  I can easily see that turning into a big pain at
many levels.

Is there a practical problem with exporting everything?  If not, I'd be
inclined to let it go wild ...