Dear Monks,

I have a nagging question and seek your wisdom. I would like to distribute a perl-based application as a bundle, not for security but for easy installation. I'd like to be able to use perl to write apps that don't require the user to install anything else including perl.

There are two apps really, one is a standalone windows app using wxperl and sqlite, another one would run in a cywin environment using the cygwin dll and would launch a server.

I know there are installers and PAR is good, but what I'd really like is a way to put the various necessary files in one file and run from there.. like a virtual filesystem in a file. Ideally a set of nested folders including perl and compiled modules would be packed into a single exe.

I did find Thinstall which looks impressive but is quite pricey and I don't think I need a whole "virtual machine", just the virtual filesystem. I think Tcl's starkits do something a little bit like this. I also wonder if with Thinstall, if I was updating a sqlite table and the program was killed it could corrupt the binary but that isn't my worry right now. I haven't ever used perlcc or what ActiveState has, but would like to hear people who have used it.

Any ideas? I got to thinking about loopback filesystems but read that windows doesn't allow it (maybe that's old info). Maybe I should look at linux distros for windows that use the filesystem in a file, but I don't want to stop windows from running on the users' machines.

Thanks for your input.

Matt R.

In reply to Bundling tools for perl GUI apps by mattr

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.