bor.borygmus

If you’re installing Kepler (Lua web stack) on Cygwin via luarocks, you may encounter this error message:

> luarocks install kepler
Installing http://luarocks.luaforge.net/rocks/kepler-1.1.1-1.src.rock...
[...]
/usr/local/lib/luarocks/bin/setup-kepler
    --prefix=/usr/local/kepler
    --web=$(KEPLER_WEB)
    --plat=unix
sh: KEPLER_WEB: command not found
[...]
Error: Failed running post_install hook.

Kepler’s build system depends on an environment variable that luarocks can’t provide. So let’s provide it. (This is for zsh; for other shells, you might need to put the variable assignment at the beginning or in an export.)

> luarocks install kepler KEPLER_WEB=/usr/local/kepler/htdocs
[...]
Enjoy Kepler!
Updating manifest for /usr/local/lib/luarocks/rocks

Hooray!

matplotlib takes the goodness of the Matlab plotting API (and more!) and puts it in Python. It’s an astonishingly identical API. And now you want to compile it on Cygwin. You’ve scoured the Usenets. You’ve scoured your pots and pans. And it’s impossible. Or is it?