Re: question on glade/gtkperl application packaging

[Chas Owens <cowens intercall com>]

On Wed, 2002-05-15 at 12:40, Joe Smith wrote:
> Thomas Ledbetter wrote:
> >   I've been messin' around with gtk perl for a while...
>  >
> >   Has any one had much success in _easily_ packing everything up into a
> > single executable?
>  > ...
>
> Oh man would I like to hear an answer to this!
>
> I have an application built with Glade.  By the time it gets installed, 
> there are files in three different sub_trees_ of /usr/lib/perl5, three 
> different sub_trees_ of /usr/local/lib/perl5, an application code tree 
> under /usr/local, an application data tree under /usr/local and user 
> configuration and data in each home directory.  It's an absolute 
> nightmare to get it to build and install and run correctly.

My example uses the __DATA__ feature of Perl, but you could just as
easily use Inline::Files to manage multiple virtual files.

> Tracking all the dependencies (Gtk-perl, glade, glade-perl, icons, 
> various CPAN modules) is another nightmare.

I don't like glade-perl, I prefer Gtk::GladeXML as I feel it gives me
more control.  The dependency nightmare is hard to solve.

> Has anyone thought about something like Java, where everything can be 
> stuffed in an archive and 'exec'ed from there?

I guess you could have a script that looks like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use File::Path;

mkpath("/tmp/$0/$$/");
#unzip the DATA file somehow (I know there are 
#modules to do this, but I haven't used them).
system("/tmp/$0/$$/$0");
rmtree("/tmp/$0/$$/");

__DATA__
gziped tarball of your application here

> <Joe

-- 
Today is Setting Orange the 62nd day of Discord in the YOLD 3168
Pzat!

Missile Address: 33:48:3.521N  84:23:34.786W