From: Dido Sevilla <dido.sevilla@...>
Date: 2005-03-26T23:37:21+09:00
Subject: Re: Best Way to Distribute Non-Code Files

On Sat, 26 Mar 2005 02:19:15 +0900, Zed A. Shaw <zedshaw@zedshaw.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I was just wondering what other folks have done when distributing files
> that aren't code with their Ruby applications?  I have about 5-6 very
> small files that are data which get read into the application.

Well, I recently wrote a small program in FXRuby that would have
otherwise loaded GIF icons from a certain path, all of which were
under 4K in size, and I made the entire program totally self-contained
by base64 encoding these GIFs and embedding them as strings inside the
program. I don't know if this trick will work for your application
though.  It has the advantage of making it dead easy to distribute the
program, as only the script file was required provided that the user
already has a working version of Ruby and FXRuby available (as the
target was Windows, the one-click installer made this certain).

Frankly, I don't see any problem with embodying non-code data as Ruby
code as I have done, provided there's a good reason to do so.