Re: Using PAR with gtk2 on MS Windows

[muppet <scott asofyet org>]

On Apr 26, 2005, at 6:09 PM, Stephan Brunner wrote:

> with PAR (par.perl.org), it is possible to create self-contained 
> .exe-files of
> perl scripts that run on a Windows desktop without any Perl installed
...
> I would very much like to create such a self-contained .exe-file of my 
> own
> gtk2-perl application, but
...
> With the -l option, I was able to include additional libraries, but 
> they are
> not found / linked / loaded correctly: I simply added a -l for *every* 
> .dll
> found in the GTK\2.0\ installation directory, but still get an error 
> when
> trying to start the .exe on the other windows box without perl / Gtk
> installed (pango complains about not being able to find dynamic 
> libraries).

As i recall, PAR's general approach is to tar up everything needed at 
runtime by your program into a scratch "runtime" directory, and load 
perl modules and shared objects out of that.

A wrinkle here is that gtk+ considers itself a "system-level" library 
(e.g., users wouldn't install it, distro managers would), and expects 
to be "installed".  At runtime, the library needs to locate data files 
(images, translations, and other resources) and modules (image loaders, 
input modules, text formatters, etc).  Because of this, gtk+ is one of 
those notably non-relocatable packages.  (Please feel free to prove me 
wrong.)

So, without taking a fair amount of control in the packaging and 
unpackaging process, i'd find it somewhat surprising if you succeeded 
in including gtk+ in a PARball.


> Is there any way to include those libraries within the PAR-created 
> executable,
> so that I can just take it, drop it into another Windows machine and 
> run it?
> Has anybody on the list ever tried to do that (and, hopefully, 
> suceeded)?

I know that people have attempted to use PAR on gtk2-perl programs 
before, with frustrating results.  Usually the archiving worked well on 
linux, but on windows the module inexplicably refused to initialize 
correctly.  This was several months ago, and i have not kept up with 
things since then.  Try the mailing list archives (use google, not the 
gnome.org search).



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