From: Kevin Smith <sent@...>
Date: 2000-12-30T13:09:44+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:8328] Re: RAA-ANN: rbwrap 0.1.0

Robert Feldt wrote:
>rbwrap - Creating stand-alone executables from Ruby programs
>
>It's inspired by previous discussion on ruby-talk and by the
>wrapping/freezing utilities of python and tcl.

Excellent. Having written a prototype to 
accomplish a similar goal, I'm quite interested 
in your approach.

>2. copy rbwrap.rb and memunwrapper.c to were you want to wrap exe's
(snip)
>Requirements?
>-------------
>Windows NT or 2000, Cygwin 1.1.x with gcc compiler, and Ruby 1.6.x.

Ok. I gather you pack everything into a 
proprietary format, and unpack it at run-time. I 
had considered this approach, but had security 
concerns. It means that the app is writing out 
files that will then be executed (exe's and/or 
dll's in Win-speak). I wasn't sure if *nix folks 
would be offended by that, or if it's perfectly 
acceptable. (I'd appreciate *nix folks speaking 
up--I'm a long-time Windows guy who just recently 
switched).

It seems like you could pre-compile your 
unpacker. The packer could then append all the 
other pieces to the end of a copy of the unpacker 
(that's what I had done). It would avoid the 
requirement that the person doing the packaging 
has access to a C compiler. Thoughts?

>rbwrap will likely fail to find dependencies if you dynamically decide
>what
>modules to require/load into your program. However, you can explicitly 
>specify files that rbwrap didn't find. Just list them after your program
>on the command line.

My prototype had the same problem. You have a 
nice solution.

I'll take a look, but that particular project has 
fallen a few notches on my to-do list. I would 
apreciate if you could confirm my beliefs about 
your approach.

Thanks!

Kevin