On Thu, 2003-05-29 at 15:34, Autrijus Tang wrote: > Thanks for everybody who have responded to my first survey. > [snip] > > Now, I'd like to hear inputs (possible applications, ideas, > any thoughts) for some new-or-future feature ideas mentioned > in the tutorial slides: > [snip]
> 9) Any more wish items to add to wishlist? Always. :-) Two that I have been thinking about lately: It may be beneficial to have PAR (and Apache::PAR) be able to support PAR's within PAR's... That is, having a PAR file which itself contains sub-archives. In a web application framework, this would resemble the Java EAR format. Using this, a web application developer could then create a bundle of applications to be distributed together and loaded with a single PARLocation. Additionally, I could see a benefit for non-web based PAR files. For base modules, CPAN modules, etc which are included into a PAR archive, they could be grouped into separate archives within the main archive, so when the PAR is uncompressed the resulting file structure is still readable. Maybe something like a par/ directory (by default) inside a PAR file to allow it to recurse... If this is possible with PAR, I believe it would be a fairly straightforward change for Apache::PAR. Another idea: Is it possible for PAR to set an environment variable (like PAR => 1, or better yet, PAR => "/path/to/par/file.par") when executing code from a library which is inside a PAR archive? I know this is kinda far fetched, but it would allow a module author to have code which behaves differently depending on whether a module is being executed within a PAR archive or not - this would be particularly useful for web applications, which could then read template files, etc out of the archive instead of from the local file system. Because of the mod_perl environment, however, this would have to be done when the code is executed, not used (otherwise PAR would be set for everything which subsequently runs in that process.) Alternatively, as a possibly better approach could we force a symbol entry for each package so a module author could check for that? For instance, if the DBI package was found and loaded from a PAR archive, it would create a scalar in the DBI symbol table something like $DBI::PAR = "/path/to/par/file.par";. Thanks, -- Nathan Byrd <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
