[ruby-talk:11192] Packaging, bytecode, and archives.

FYI, this is a Perl6 issue that may be relevant for future implementations 
of Ruby.

Simon Cozens
This week on perl6 (04--11 Feb 2001) 

# Packaging
# 
# The autoloaded core functions idea got slightly left by the wayside,
# as the discussion finally veered off onto how to package up modules
# and programs to satisfy dependencies and make things easy for the
# user. A setup similar to Java's "jar"s was suggested. Dan came up with
# the very simple and neat idea of simply shipping a bytecode compiled
# version of a program instead. Schwern was a bit concerned that this
# would lose source code and would separate out documentation; Dan's
# brilliant answer was: 
# 
#      Not unless you strip the bytecode. I want to optionally package
#      the source in the bytecode, since otherwise you can't do some
#      optimizations after the fact on the generated bytecode stream. 
# 
# He also suggested a text segment in bytecode so that, for instance,
# you can still get POD embedded in code. 
# 
# That's something that may well happen anyway, but Branden came back on
# the packaging issue. He noted that Dan's suggestion wouldn't help for
# modules with C extensions, and also said: 
# 
#      Actually, I think the archive approach is more general, because
#      it wouldn't have this kind of problems and would allow other
#      resources to be deployed together with the code, like
#      documentation, perhaps even text files and images used by a
#      Perl/Tk application 
# 
# Comparisons were made between this and the currently-existing PPM.
# Branden produced a draft PDD for his ideas. 

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Conrad Schneiker
(This note is unofficial and subject to improvement without notice.)