The change to lua50.dll

This is a good idea, except... It creates the same potential hazard that some older ODBC applications had, where if they change to lua51.dll, or lua60.dll (I assume this 'is' a version number), then you get stuck either a) changing the client to 'fix' it so the new version works, b) renaming the dll, which could break something in Lua itself, or c) rendering Lua unusable.

This is ironically why some, though as usual, not the ones released by MS, ODBC interfaces for databases use a registry key that includes:

Blah...
|--Name: mydb5.3
|--Global Name: mydb

Well, sort of. I don't remember the keys exactly, but all the ones from MS are missing them, which is why we have to specify a version number, even though the DBs are backward compatible, when linking to them in a script. For those that have the correct global name, it normally connects you to the highest version, which is pointed to by that name. The point was to avoid this kind of version dependency glitch. This 'seems' to be a potential hazard for Mushclient as well. Maybe the lua dll should not be hard coded into the client, but in the global settings (but with the ability of the client to default to the current one, if the setting is missing), in case they do come out with lua51.dll, lua60.dll or some other highly inconvenient change?

Yes, I think it is a version number, and the "50" is because version 5.1 of Lua is going to introduce various improvements.

I agree it is a potential problem, and am familiar with the version number mess that various systems get themselves into.

However having said that, a single DLL will hardly be dependant on its own name, so in the future if Lua 5.1 is released, and you are not using an external applications (like LuaSQL) then you could simply rename (or copy) lua51.dll to be lua50.dll and it should still work with MUSHclient.

However what is a [b]real[/b] problem today, is that the Lua developers seem to have standardised on releasing Lua in that form, and thus other developers (eg. LuaSQL) are writing DLLs that expect to find lua50.dll and not some other name. Without this change we have a problem today, rather than some hypothetical future problem.