From: ptkwt@... (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2003-12-18T12:36:55+09:00
Subject: Re: Running Ruby from a CD

In article <4ciskqmget.fsf@scxw21.4sc>,
Frank Schmitt  <invalid@see-signature.info> wrote:
>ptkwt@aracnet.com (Phil Tomson) writes:
>
>> I'm looking into a contract to develop a license manager/installation tool 
>> for a software CD.  The CD has several different tools on it and allows 
>> the user to install and use the software for a trial period.  The license 
>> manager/installation tool has to be able to determine if it's a trial 
>> license or a real license and it also has to allow the user to purchase a 
>> real license (by going online) for any or all of the products on the CD.
>> Oh, and it has to work with both Linux (by interacting with the rpm 
>> manager) and Windows (by interacting with the registry).
>> 
>> Currently they've done this tool in C++ and has no gui.  The customer is 
>> talking about an upgrade of the tool and a possible gui (and possibly 
>> using Tk for the GUI).  Of course, I'm 
>> thinking that there might be a possiblility to use Ruby for this, but the 
>> first problem is that Ruby isn't installed everywhere.  So then I got the 
>> idea to run Ruby directly from the CD somehow - has anyone done this sort 
>> of thing?
>> 
>> Also, since the same CD has to work on both Windows or Linux, I need to 
>> have two Ruby's installed.  How would I determine which one to run?
>
>I'd just put a setup.bat and a setup.sh file on the CD, which then calls
>the ruby interpreter from the CD with the appropriate .rb file.
>Of course, your user has to be clever enough to figure out whether to
>execute setup.bat or setup.sh :-)

Turns out they've got seperate CDs for Windows and Linux, so it's a 
non-issue.

As an experiment I burned a CD witha Ruby intallation on it and in the 
root directory of the CD I made a setup.bat that looks something like:

..\bin\ruby makebat.rb  #creates a bat file in %TEMP% that sets up env vars
%TEMP%setenv.bat       #sets up TCL and TK env vars Ruby needs
..\bin\ruby main.rb     #starts a little Ruby/TK gui


makebat.rb just creates a batch file in %TEMP% to set the RUBY_TCL_LIB and 
RUBY_TK_LIB env variables.

Then I tried it on a Windows box that didn't have either Ruby or Tk 
installed on it and it worked.  Looks like a viable option.

Phil