From: Robert Feldt <feldt@...>
Date: 2001-12-18T20:46:20+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:28864] Re: [IDEA] creating stand-alone versions for easy distribution etc

On Tue, 18 Dec 2001, Patrik Sundberg wrote:

> 1. create a good tool for analyzing dependencies. must also be able to fall
> back on explicitly named dependencies.
> 
Make this as stand-alone as possible since other projects will need
it. The recent rdoc discussion springs to mind.

> 2. create an archive class for ruby. this would hold just about any file and
> have a table of contents to be able to find files.
> 
> 3. create modified versions of require and load which can use a $ARCHIVEPATH
> and a $ARCHIVEARRAY for require/load. in $ARCHIVEPATH we list directories to
> search for arhivefiles (which are marshalled versions of archive objects) and
> in $ARCHIVEARRAY we put already created archive objects (like the one we will
> create from the data at the end of a executable).
> 
Check out previous discussion on RubyGems. I posted some code that had a
simple Archive class; maybe you can build on it. Was back in
october/november or so. Search for Ryan Leavengood and RubyGems.

> 4. write a tool which finds dependencies, creates a archive, creates a exe
> which will:
>   - create a ruby interpreter (link staticly with libruby and we get the
> 	version used by the packager?) passing any arguments etc.
>   - apply the require/load mods
>   - read the archive from end of file (using argv[0] to find filename?)
>   - create ruby object from data and stuff it into the $ARCHIVEARRAY
>   - load the main script using the modified load (i.e from the archive at the
> 	end of the file)
> 
> to me this at a glance seems doable and quite straigt forward :) any
> reflections?
> 
It should be very doable and useful. It was what I had in mind for rbwrap
but the alpha worked ok for what I needed back then and then I never
updated it.

Regards,

Robert