Probably not what you want to hear, but on a previous project (before I knew about LuaRocks) to save some time I used kepler-1.1beta2 as part of my base OSX and

Probably not what you want to hear, but on a previous project (before I knew about LuaRocks) to save some time I used kepler-1.1beta2 as part of my base OSX and linux Lua stack because the Kepler folks went to the trouble of creating an autotools bundle with several extensions I wanted. I didn't actually use Kepler itself but their build logic worked well.