luarocks now works nicely with Lua 5.2 (it can also be run by Lua 5.2,
which is convenient for using it with Lua 5.2, though not of course
essential).

Please could you add support to the package for parallel 5.1 & 5.2
rocks trees. Support to ease this has recently been added to git
upstream.

The system I use is to have rock trees installed under
PREFIX/lib/luarocks/5.[12]/rocks/ (via setting rocks_dir in the
configuration file) and to have separate luarocks5.[12] and
luarocks-admin5.[12] executables (this second step has to be done with
manual renaming or by patching the build system at present). Finally,
different configuration files need to be used, and again this requires
patching (I use environment variables, and LUAROCKS_CONFIG_5_2 is now
supported, but that of course only helps users, not system-wide
installation).

See https://github.com/keplerproject/luarocks/issues/99

Dear Maintainer,

I'm interested in seeing this existing issue fixed, or reassigned to a more
urgent status.  I'm willing to help out if time is thin, so please let me know.
Naturally I prefer to install as much software as possible from the Debian
repos, and as I develop against Lua5.2 I consider this a blocker for using
luarocks on Debian.

   * What led up to the situation?
Installing luarocks from within Synaptic forces installation of liblua5.1-dev,
lua5.1.

  * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
     ineffective)?
Nothing.  The package's DEBIAN/control file specifies the following:
  'Depends: liblua5.1-dev, lua5.1
...Therefore the only solution (for me) to this problem is to buildand install
luarocks from the upstream source.

   * What was the outcome of this action?
-Installation of lua5.1 and liblua5.1-dev is forced on a system with a sane
lua5.2 development environment.
-Calling require 'luarocks.loader' from within a Lua5.2 interpreter fails.
-Calling require 'luarocks.loader' from within a Lua5.1 interpreter succeeds.
   * What outcome did you expect instead?
I expect luarocks to work with both major versions of Lua.  Since Lua5.2 is
different enough from Lua 5.1 in language features, falling back to Lua 5.1 is
not feasible.

Best

Luke