[Users] Lua plugin announcement

[Milan Obuch]

Hi,

we are celebrating Lunar New Year today, starting the Year of Tiger.
Lua, in Portuguese, means Moon, which makes today a perfect day for
public announcement of Lua plugin.

For a (lunar) year, there were (lunar) monthly announcements on Lua
plugin development, with sources made available, on devel mailing list.
It is no longer publicly endorsed, its archive is not easily accessible
(only for subscribers, subscription form somehow hidden), thus I am
making this announcement in order to get more exposure and some
feedback.

What it is? Lua plugin for Claws Mail is a scripting plugin, using Lua
as its scripting engine. It could be seen as a replacement for Python
plugin. I started it this way, because I was not able to build Python
plugin when Python 2 was phased out of FreeBSD port repository. After
some time, I realised I am not able to move Python plugin to Python 3
for some reason, but I started to work with Lua for some project. Then
an idea sparked, after some hacking I created basic simple plugin.

When my immediate needs were satisfied, I started to port more features
from Python plugin, looked into Perl plugin for some ideas, put
something new into it, did almost complete code rewrite and restructure
and started slowly working towards making it standard part of Claws
Mail source tarball. This is only started, but formal requirements
aside (coding style match), it is important to show this plugin is
still being maintained, it could solve some problems encountered by
users, in short, it is usefull.

In the meantime, Thorsten Maerz helped to enhance building
infrastructure for Windows builds. He created an experimental installer
with Lua support. I started recently to verify this work, after some
recent cleanup, just to be able to verify myself the build still work
after some change is done, locally. At present, Lua plugin can be built
as FreeBSD port or on any Linux from source, for both GTK2 and GTK3
versions.

Now the executive summary: if anybody like to try it, please respond
here. I send then all sources for this plugin and help with the build
(probably privately, but with outcome being presented here as well). As
done in past, I plan to monitor this mailing list for some interesting
ideas or problems, which could benefit from Lua plugin.

Regards,
Milan