[Pdx-pm] Perl executables...

Tom Phoenix rootbeer at redcat.com
Wed May 21 22:23:15 CDT 2003


On Wed, 21 May 2003, Chris Dawson wrote:

> I am definitely not saying it makes sense.

That's good. When management starts making sense, I'll have to start
wearing a tie and stop reading Dilbert. :-)

> They trust our .exe because we signed a contract

That's a lousy reason to trust someone. But (as I'm sure you realize, but
for the benefit of anyone else playing along at home) that means that they
are letting you vouch for ActiveState's code, even if they don't know that
they're doing that.

> All of this seems like it is much more difficult to do than shipping a
> .exe perl program,

You're right there.

We (by which I mean "we who understand enough to be able to do such a
thing") should put together an easy way to make executable bundles o'
Perl, which is a simple perl binary compiled up with a program and any
needed modules in one big executable file.

It doesn't require much patching to the perl source to be able to do this,
I'm pretty sure. We'll have these advantages, then, over applications like
perl2exe: Ours will be free, ours will be open-source, ours can come with
perl, ours will work on all platforms, ours will get the latest updates at
once, ours should be decompilable, and therefore ours would be able to be
upgraded (or even switched from one os to another) in the field.

And the pointy-haired bosses will never need to know.

--Tom Phoenix




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