Monks,

I keep hearing about PAR. I looked at the author's Slide Presentation on his website. I read the use.perl announcements. I even looked at the new mailing list. What's the big deal with this? Why hasn't it been mentioned in any magazines (merlyn?) or slashdot? I did a news.google search and found nothing . . . Just want hear what the monks have to say about it. How important is PAR? Is it something that Perl really needed?

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•Re: What is the big deal about PAR?
by merlyn (Sage) on Mar 15, 2003 at 15:57 UTC
    PAR is being developed rapidly and recently. It's the perfect replacement for commercial bundler solutions (like PerlApp and perl2exe). If you search here at the monastery, you'll find many recent references to PAR.

    PAR solves a nice niche of problems. PAR bundles can also be used with Apache::PAR to create the equivalent of JSP units. Nice.

    I haven't done a column on PAR... yet. It's in my short to-do list... probably in a few months or so when I fully get my head around all the ways it can be used.

    -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
    Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

[reply]
      It's the perfect replacement for commercial bundler solutions (like PerlApp and perl2exe).

      I vaguely remember reading that Parrot would create executables. Is this true? Would Parrot make any features of PAR obsolete? Where's a Perl 6 internals architect when you need one?

[reply]

        Parrot will produce bytecode, which is really an intermediary form. It will not be directly executable, you will still need an installed version of the Parrot VM to execute it, much like you need a Java VM to execute Java bytecode. This is not to say that something with functionality like PAR will not emerge, but from what I've read so far, it doesn't look like Parrot will include that functionality itself.

        kelan

        Perl6 Grammar Student

[reply]
        Parrot will potentially make all of PAR obsolete, but that's OK.

        If things work out right you'll be able to generate single-file standalone executables as well, but that's a separate thing.

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Re: What is the big deal about PAR?
by batkins (Chaplain) on Mar 16, 2003 at 02:02 UTC
    PAR's great for distributing perl scripts along with their dependencies. For example, the milkbone AIM client (http://milkbone.org) uses plugins that are distributed as PAR files. A single PAR file includes all of the plugin's code and all of the modules it might need.

    Also, as another poster mentioned, PAR is an open-source replacement for PerlApp and Perl2Exe (which weren't that great to begin with).

[reply]
      I ran into a problem about the "open-sourcesness" of PAR based solutions.

      PAR uses searches for and includes perl*.dll on Windows. But if I use ActivestatePerl, I would be using PAR to redistribute their dll, something which I am quite sure AS-Software does not like.

      Sadly, I could find no 'working' Perl binary for Windows which offers the same ease of use as AS-Perl (PPM!). The problem comes down to this: other Perl distributions make it very difficult to install CPAN-Modules as most modules expect a working C-enviroment...

      *sigh* when will Perl Modules be self-sufficient enough to ignore C and make?

[reply]
        ActivePerl is open source perl, and as such, you can redistribute it any way you see fit, almost all dll's included (i say almost cause there may exist some modules which aren't released under the L?GPL, but I don't know of any). If that wasn't true, it'd be illegal for people to host PPM repositories. All that is under the L?GPL can be distributed this way.

        MJD says you can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!
        I run a Win32 PPM repository for perl 5.6x+5.8x. I take requests.
        ** The Third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.

[reply]

        The DLL may be marked as being redistributable. Someone with AS perl handy might want to check that (or I will later when I get back the AS perl machine).

        Seeking Green geeks in Minnesota

[reply]
Re: What is the big deal about PAR?
by gmpassos (Priest) on Mar 17, 2003 at 06:42 UTC
    Well, PAR is not the only one that make this. Take a look at: App::Packer, TinyPerl, Perl2Exe, PerlBin.

    Graciliano M. P.
    "The creativity is the expression of the liberty".

[reply]

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