Installer discussion

From Perl Archiving Toolkit

[edit] Discussion about adding an Installer mode to PAR/pp

See also: Development in progress

tsee: Hi there. Quick question: given an extracted PAR binary's cache directory. Is it possible to run the application using the contents of the cache directory only (ie. without the original binary)?

audreyt: I'd s'ppose so

tsee: How?

audreyt: cd %CACHE%

audreyt: path %PATH%;.

audreyt: (probably implicit)

audreyt: perl -Ilib scripts/main.pl

audreyt: (it's Win32 notation; adjust for unix to fit)

tsee: Erm.

tsee: I'd like that to work without installed perl.

audreyt: you need to have an entry somehow

audreyt: to libperl

audreyt: if it's dynperl, you need to ship another perl.exe

tsee: We have all elements right there. There is a parl, a shared perl library, the PAR files (though with mangled file names)...

audreyt: yes, but that's only for dynperl

audreyt: for static perl, there is no shared perl lib

audreyt: so yes, for dynperl with suitable PAR::Heavy dmeangling

audreyt: you can run it just fine I s'ppose

tsee: for a static perl, how does the packaging & running work? I mean, what is the cache directory missing in order to run the program?

audreyt: perl.exe?

tsee: parl.exe doesn't suffice?

audreyt: the static pp'ed executable doesn't extract parl.exe

audreyt: at least I didn't think so

tsee: But basically, it *is* parl, right? I haven't dug into that part of the code yet, thankfully.

audreyt: I mean, for static, the .exe itself is parl

audreyt: a.out itself

audreyt: it doesn't embed a copy of parl

tsee: right.

audreyt: like in dynperl scenario

tsee: So the executable could reasonably write a copy of itself minus the zip/par payload to the cache.

audreyt: yes.

tsee: I'm driving at a flag that would "install" the contents of a binary to some static directory.

audreyt: I see that coming, yes. good idea.

tsee: It's been requested multiple times.

tsee: And I thought it shouldn't be hard.

audreyt: aye.

tsee: But since the whole of the packing / unpacking code is rather strange to me, this will be harder than originally anticipated. Oh well.