[Dev-luatex] luasocket

[Hans Hagen]

Jonathan Sauer wrote:
> Hello, 
> 
>> I've just committed the incorporation of "luasocket" by Diego 
>> Nehab, see 
>> http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~diego/professional/luasocket/
>>
>> This allows luatex to browse the web ;-)
> 
> What about luacoffee? I'd like LuaTeX to make coffee ;-)
> 
> But seriously: From looking into the Context source, it seems that
> this would be used to download modules/packages/files on the fly,
> just like MikTeX does it.

this is not on my agenda yet -)

the reason for adding luasocket is that in addition to files, sockets 
are used for i/o and we consider it therefore fundamental; support for 
http and ftp is in the embedded libraries, but other things will not be 
provided as they can be programmed in lua;

> A security consideration, though: There should be an option to
> disable this module to prevent LuaTeX from playing E.T. (phoning
> home). Extending the --safer option would not be fine-grained
> enough, since this option only deals with local accesses, not
> remote ones. So maybe a --nosocket option. That way, net access
> can be disabled, but not file access (since --safer also prevents
> io.open from opening files for writing).

you can do socket = nil as first line in your startup script

Hans

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