Looking for a Perl packager/compiler/installer

Daniel Walmsley daniel at landmarksoftware.com.au
Wed Jun 12 22:29:26 CDT 2002


We've been using ActiveState's PerlApp for a while now, and it works well.
In answer to your concerns:

1) You can force it to include additional modules that are not automagically
included using a command line switch. I can't remember which one, and I'm
not at the right machine to look at it, but trust me, it's there ;)
2) There's nothing stopping you from distributing your source code AND the
precompiled executable, is there? Or at least making your source available
on request. I believe Richard Stallman would approve. ;-) In the meantime,
is your code actually GPLd? If not, then even if you give it away, this is
not necessarily in the spirit of the GPL; that is, they can then modify and
redistribute applications based on the code without having to make their
source code public.

Cheers,

Dan

-----Original Message-----
From: Simon Taylor [mailto:simon at unisolve.com.au] 
Sent: Thursday, 13 June 2002 9:46 AM
To: Melbourne Perl Mongers
Subject: Re: Looking for a Perl packager/compiler/installer


Graeme,

> I would still be interested in hearing about alternatives or anyone's 
> war stories about PerlDev/PerlApp.

We've used ActiveState's Perl devKit to produce stand-alone executables for 
the same reasons that interest you. We had a client who wanted to be able to
install a single executable for demonstration purposes rather that going to 
the "trouble" of downloading ActiveState Perl on each new machine.

At the time, (mid last year), we were unable to produce a completely 
stand-alone executable, and we had to resort to shipping the exe file with a

few miscellaneous perl files of our own. But I suspect that given more time,

we could have resolved this issue.

It bothered me a little bit that we were suddenly shipping code that some 
interested end-user couldn't *inspect*, and I felt an attack of the Richard 
Stallman's coming on ;-), so I resolved that if we ever had to do this in 
future, I would include a README file (or a hyperlink in the case of a 
perl/tk app), showing where the source code inside the exe file could be 
found.....

Regards,

Simon Taylor 
-- 
Unisolve Pty Ltd - Melbourne, Australia
+61 3 9568 2005



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