From: Daniel Carrera <dcarrera@...>
Date: 2003-08-08T09:39:29+09:00
Subject: Distributing Ruby applications

Hello Rubyists,

I was hoping to hear some thoughts on the distribution of applications   
made with Ruby.  Say I make a GUI app with wxRuby.  I am not guaranteed 
that the user will have wxRuby, or even have Ruby at all. I want to make 
it as easy as possible for other people to run it.

I thought that I could distribute my app as a zip file which would 
contain a copy of ruby for the intended platform, as well as all the 
libraries, and of course my Ruby program.  The zip would also contain a 
shell script which would set up the appropriate Ruby environment and run 
the application.  Something like this:

#/bin/sh
#
# myprogram -- This is the file that the user actually runs.

RUBYLIB="."
PATH="."

ruby my_ruby_prog.rb


I'm sure that it's possible to do something like that for Windows also.

The user would simply unzip the file and click on "myprogram", which is 
the above shell script.  So it would be a zero-install program.

Would this work the way I expect?

My distribution zip file could contain a directory for every platform that 
is supported.

Thoughts?
-- 
Daniel Carrera | PGP: 6643 8C8B 3522 66CB D16C D779 2FDD 7DAC 9AF7 7A88
Math PhD. UMD  | http://www.math.umd.edu/~dcarrera/pgp.html

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