comp.lang.ruby

Joel VanderWerf

11/28/2006 10:07:00 PM

Oleg Barenboim wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am new to Ruby. So far, I am really enjoying the language. But, I am
> a bit concerned about packaging applications written in Ruby.
>
> Has there been any thought to implementing something like Tcl's VFS (see
> http://wiki.t...)?
>
> The VFS support allows for virtualizing the file system calls to more
> naturally program things that are remote (HTTP or FTP) and local (zip
> and tar files). Using this functionality, the Tcl community was able to
> create starkits (originally with zip files and now with metakit
> (http://equi4.com/me...) files).
>
> A Starkit (http://equi4.com/st...) creates the illusion of a
> "file system in a file" - on the outside, it's a single file, yet the
> application code continues to see a complete directory of scripts,
> extensions, packages, images, and whatever other files it needs.
> Starkits can be multi-platform.
>
> After the success of starkits, they were able to wrap up everything into
> a single executable that they call starpacks (http://wiki.t...).
> This allows for the delivery of an application as a single file that,
> for the most part, does not need to be unpacked to temporary locations
> because the Tcl core has VFS that allows it to look introspectively into
> the executable.
>
> I am not bashing Ruby. I have looked at RubyScript2exe and think it is
> a great start. It would be great if a more robust solution were
> available to allow for clean packaging of Ruby applications.

Check out Mauricio Fernandez' file FS based on ruby's DATA feature:

http://eigenclass.org/hiki.rb?cmd=view&p=pure+ruby+compiler&...

If you just want to package a ruby app that doesn't contain native
shared objects (just pure ruby libs), you can package it as a single
ruby script file (which doesn't get unpacked to temp files at run time)
using darb:

http://redshift.sourceforge...

Note that this doesn't allow you to package other data files, unless you
wrap them in ruby code (which is not necessarily a bad idea).

--
vjoel : Joel VanderWerf : path berkeley edu : 510 665 3407