From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2006-11-29T07:07:17+09:00
Subject: Re: VFS, Starkits and Starpacks

Oleg Barenboim wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am new to Ruby.  So far, I am really enjoying the language.  But, I am 
> a bit concerned about packaging applications written in Ruby.
> 
> Has there been any thought to implementing something like Tcl's VFS (see 
> http://wiki.tcl.tk/2138)?
> 
> The VFS support allows for virtualizing the file system calls to more 
> naturally program things that are remote (HTTP or FTP) and local (zip 
> and tar files).  Using this functionality, the Tcl community was able to 
> create starkits (originally with zip files and now with metakit 
> (http://equi4.com/metakit.html) files).
> 
>  A Starkit (http://equi4.com/starkit.html) creates the illusion of a 
> "file system in a file" - on the outside, it's a single file, yet the 
> application code continues to see a complete directory of scripts, 
> extensions, packages, images, and whatever other files it needs. 
> Starkits can be multi-platform.
> 
> After the success of starkits, they were able to wrap up everything into 
> a single executable that they call starpacks (http://wiki.tcl.tk/3663). 
> This allows for the delivery of an application as a single file that, 
> for the most part, does not need to be unpacked to temporary locations 
> because the Tcl core has VFS that allows it to look introspectively into 
> the executable.
> 
> I am not bashing Ruby.  I have looked at RubyScript2exe and think it is 
> a great start.  It would be great if a more robust solution were 
> available to allow for clean packaging of Ruby applications.

Check out Mauricio Fernandez' file FS based on ruby's DATA feature:

http://eigenclass.org/hiki.rb?cmd=view&p=pure+ruby+compiler&key=block

If you just want to package a ruby app that doesn't contain native 
shared objects (just pure ruby libs), you can package it as a single 
ruby script file (which doesn't get unpacked to temp files at run time) 
using darb:

http://redshift.sourceforge.net/darb/

Note that this doesn't allow you to package other data files, unless you 
wrap them in ruby code (which is not necessarily a bad idea).

-- 
       vjoel : Joel VanderWerf : path berkeley edu : 510 665 3407