in reply to Bundling tools for perl GUI apps

Thank you very, very much. PAR looks like it will do exactly what I want for the wxperl + sqlite app I mentioned. I had a pretty superficial and dated understanding of what PAR can do and have been surfing resources to learn more about it. Thank you again.

It looks like a bit of experimentation is in order. Maybe you have answers to these questions? (I've now read the PAR pods, A. Tangs' slides, and the faq).

1. For a wxperl + sqlite app, I guess it will be safest to use just Activestate Perl.
2. Can I however do it in cygwin using cygwin perl, and run perl in cygwin environment inside the PAR archive?
3. Will PAR pull in cygwin1.dll so I can still launch as a single EXE?
4. For the second app, which is cygwin apache and CGI or better mod_perl, I wanted to know if par would happily pack httpd and httpd.conf, and let me launch a web server as a forked process from within perl, and let me run a mod_perl server inside this EXE. I see from Tang slide 17b that somehow with PAR and Apache::PAR this actually works!! Is this the best kept secret of perldom? Actually that and the next few slides are amazing. I also understand now that with PAR we can do on demand libraries and product activation too.
4b. Though after all 40 slides I don't see how we have an actual virtual filesystem that other programs will believe. Trust in magic.. I want to see the output from "ls" though, I'm not quite convinced yet that will work. But then again I don't need to run that yet, and could maybe make a module to do run such an external program if there was a problem.
4c. Now wondering if I can then just run the server from a bourne shell script then.. actually the mechanism for launching the server and so on is not immediately clear from the slides and Apache::PAR tutorial but I'll work on it.
5. I notice the multiarch switch. Too much to ask for me to be able to develop it all in linux and deployed in windows?

Thanks again for your help!

Matt R.

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Re: Re: Bundling tools for perl GUI apps
by clscott (Friar) on Jan 16, 2004 at 22:23 UTC
    Answering #1,2,3

    You really should use the ActiveState distribution to prevent many headaches. The environments that cygwin and activestate run in are vastly different.

    ActiveState PAR
    Windows->Perl

    Cygwin PAR
    Windows->Cygwin->Perl

    It's the perl part and what it needs to interact with it's environment that gets boxed up. In Cygwin's case cygwin is the environment so you'd only be able to make a self hosting archive (".exe")that runs in cygwin.

    As for the rest of your questions why haven't you installed it and tested? That's all the fun.

    --
    Clayton
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Re: Re: Bundling tools for perl GUI apps
by PodMaster (Abbot) on Jan 18, 2004 at 10:34 UTC
    4b. Though after all 40 slides I don't see how we have an actual virtual filesystem that other programs will believe. Trust in magic.. I want to see the output from "ls" though, I'm not quite convinced yet that will work. But then again I don't need to run that yet, and could maybe make a module to do run such an external program if there was a problem.
    Like I already said, a zip-file is a filesystem. I don't know of any "ls" program that deals with zipfiles, but then you wouldn't want to use "ls" to manipulate zip files. See Accessing packed files in PAR::Tutorial
    5. I notice the multiarch switch. Too much to ask for me to be able to develop it all in linux and deployed in windows?
    I develop stuff on windows and deploy it on linux (and vice versa) all the time :-) All the multiarch switch does it sets up all the modules in the archive in an architecture/platform specific directory( like foo.par\MSWin32-x86-multi-thread\), so you can have a single par archive usable on many platforms (i don't see the appeal, it just bloats size).

    You still need to build a binary for each of your target platforms(par doesn't support that yet).

    PAR also doesn't support creating such a multiarch .par (par cannot leverage ppm...).

    What I just described is sort of a wishlist item (I recall it being discussed somewhere, and I believe its somewhere on the TODO but it's a long ways off).

    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 5.6.x and 5.8.x -- I take requests (README).
    ** The third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.

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