You're far off the path. I'm not into hiding my sources, but into learning on Perl as a whole. Since I can not 'prove' this you may believe what you like to. On the other hand, with you having no evidence for your assumptions, I think you're too quick in your conclusions on the motivations of posters.
On the library thing: I don't know too much on static and shared C libraries. But you may notice that, depending on your configuration, your Perl ships with those .a files, too. Including extensions as static into Perl does not seem to mean what you think it means.
~/tmp$ find perl -name '*.a'
perl/lib/5.8.8/i686-linux/auto/DynaLoader/DynaLoader.a
perl/lib/5.8.8/i686-linux/CORE/libperl.a
perl/lib/5.8.8/i686-linux-thread-multi/auto/DynaLoader/DynaLoader.a
perl/lib/5.8.8/i686-linux-thread-multi/auto/attrs/attrs.a
perl/lib/5.8.8/i686-linux-thread-multi/auto/Cwd/Cwd.a
perl/lib/5.8.8/i686-linux-thread-multi/auto/Fcntl/Fcntl.a
perl/lib/5.8.8/i686-linux-thread-multi/auto/File/Glob/Glob.a
perl/lib/5.8.8/i686-linux-thread-multi/auto/Filter/Util/Call/Call.a
perl/lib/5.8.8/i686-linux-thread-multi/auto/Filter/decrypt/decrypt.a
perl/lib/5.8.8/i686-linux-thread-multi/auto/IO/IO.a
perl/lib/5.8.8/i686-linux-thread-multi/auto/IPC/SysV/SysV.a
perl/lib/5.8.8/i686-linux-thread-multi/auto/List/Util/Util.a
perl/lib/5.8.8/i686-linux-thread-multi/auto/MIME/Base64/Base64.a
perl/lib/5.8.8/i686-linux-thread-multi/auto/PerlIO/encoding/encoding.a
perl/lib/5.8.8/i686-linux-thread-multi/auto/PerlIO/scalar/scalar.a
perl/lib/5.8.8/i686-linux-thread-multi/auto/PerlIO/via/via.a
perl/lib/5.8.8/i686-linux-thread-multi/auto/Socket/Socket.a
perl/lib/5.8.8/i686-linux-thread-multi/auto/Sys/Hostname/Hostname.a
perl/lib/5.8.8/i686-linux-thread-multi/auto/Time/HiRes/HiRes.a
perl/lib/5.8.8/i686-linux-thread-multi/CORE/libperl.a
| [reply]
[d/l] |
(After all why would anyone distribute the .a lib together with a perl that has that same module linked in? Doesn't make any sense.)
The .a lib is distributed with static modules so you can build additional
static modules later (which needs to relink perl with all the previous .a
libs).
| [reply] |
Right, but as in Perl, context matters :-)
"The encryption extension is no Shared Object (not an .so
file, but an .a file, and running it with a Perl executable different
from that one provided with the extension ends up in 'Can't find
shared object file for ... in @INC') ... "
So apparently, someone linked the encryption extension statically
with the Perl executable to make it harder to reverse engineer. Now why
would that fictive person ship this super secret decryption code along
with the rest as a separate .a file? To make it easy for everyone to relink
it with a perl patched to dump the cleartext code? Only fools would do that.
___
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." - Albert Einstein
| [reply] |
Only fools would do that.
Not fools, just the ignorant. If you don't know why EU::MM installs the
library for static modules, you probably won't suspect that it does so.
And even if you look over the list of files you are distributing, it may
not occur to you that that library has your module's code, not just some
kind of binding layer for it.
| [reply] |
#!/usr/bin/perl
print "\n* Perl2exe Perl sourcecode revealer test code\n".
" by Thijs (Thice) Bosschert\n".
" v1.0 17-06-2012\n\n";
# Comment: This is a test comment
print "\n* This is just a test line.\n\n";
| [reply] |