I've spent a good bit of time fiddling around with the Autotools setup. I never liked the way that I was discovering the Lua directories but the more I read and the more I study, the more I think that I have it right. I did change it so that ./configure will die with an error if it can't find the Lua libraries and header files. I also changed the name of configure.in to the newer configure.ac, and I changed the bootstrap.sh file to autogen.sh to make them look like they were written in this decade.
I've also added a skeleton directory for historical logging. (This is actually what got me going on the Autotools stuff) I want the historical logging module to have a plug-in type interface for the data stores. For starters, I'm going to write plug-ins for a flat file data store and a MySQL data store. Since I don't have the MySQL client libraries installed on my Macbook Pro I set the autotools stuff up to only compile that plug-in if it finds the MySQL client libraries. I also check for the existence of the dl library for dynamically loading these plug-ins at run time. I also check for the ltdl library. I'd like to have it use the dl library if found, if not then try the ltdl if found and if not then figure out a way to link all the required plug-ins at compile time. Right now I think I'm gonna stay simple and just use one of the above libraries. This should work for the vast majority of the systems. If somebody has a system without dynamic linking capability and they speak up then we'll fix it then. Right now we just need to get the historical logging module working.
I've also started working on an extension module for Python. I haven't even connected it to an OpenDAX server yet, because I am still learning how to write extension modules but I'll get there. I want to start using Python for more high level modules like user interfaces.
We still have the Lua extension module and it seems to work really well. It has some problems on Mac OS X because of the way the libraries are linked in the Lua interpreter. I haven't sorted all that out yet but I'm hoping that the 5.2 version of Lua will not statically link to the Lua libraries like the current version does. I could recompile it but it's just not a battle that I want to fight right now.
I still plan to use Lua as the primary embedded language in all of the OpenDAX system, because it is very easy to embed, it's small and fast and seems much less error prone.