Hey all. Just wanted to report a success story with PAR. I've long (since 2001) been using Perl2EXE to build AmphetaDesk, a crossplatform RSS reader that has been downloaded 100,000+ times.
When I first heard of PAR, I regarded it as the "right thing to do", both from the "who the hell are the perl2exe guys?!" and "whoohoo, this is open source!" perspectives [1].
Of course, finding time to do the tests I needed to do was the biggest problem. Happily, I got time to do that today, and I'm very, very happy.
I used the compiled binary version for Win32 (note: the wiki doesn't link to these binaries) plopped stuff into the right places, ran "pp -o", moved the .exe and related folders to another non-Perl machine, and was immensely happy to see it worked immediately. Five minutes to transfer from perl2exe to PAR rocks, and my generated PAR is 300k less. Awesome.
Some comments:
* I've yet to read or research into how to get rid of that opening DOS window. In Perl2EXE, I'd pass the -gui flag.
* Even though I can name the .exe with pp, the exe is always called "par.exe" internally. This worries me - if one of my non-knowledgeable end users click on AmphetaDesk.exe, then get a firewall warning that "par.exe" is trying to connect to the Internet, that doesn't inspire confidence (but rather paranoia about trojans). Can this be changed or modified? I don't need a command-line flag to do it - if its something I could personally modify in a .pm file, I'm fine with doing that for each upgrade/program.
All in all, though, I'm very relieved that the changeover from a closed compiler to a respected open source one was so easy. Rock.
[1] But, incidentally, never from the "compiling open source into closed binary is evil" camp, as my final build structure ships ONLY a wrapper.exe that runs pure-perl plain text files shipped alongside it. It was a neat enough structure to be asked to write about it for Perl.com, which I never did get around to. Sometime soon, sometime soon.
-- Morbus Iff ( i put the demon back in codemonkey ) Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/ Spidering Hacks: http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596005776/disobeycom icq: 2927491 / aim: akaMorbus / yahoo: morbus_iff / jabber.org: morbus
