On 6 Jul 2004 at 11:19, Dean Arnold wrote:
> Dean Arnold wrote:
> >
> > And one other thought: is there any open request for stripping comments and
> > POD from included modules ? After strolling around the PAR storage
> > directories,
> > I saw that the modules were included as ia, and in some cases, stripping
> > out
> > the comments and the POD might help reduce the overall size (and hence
> > the bootup time) significantly. Maybe this could be accomplished with a
> > one-way filter ?
>
I am not sure where you saw "as is" modules? Some modules in the temp cache dir?
By default, if you don't use a -F option, pod should be stripped from all modules. Non-
pod comments are not stripped.
If you:
set PAR_VERBATIM=1
before pp, then pod is not stripped.
BTW, one of the things on the TODO list is documentation of all $ENV{PAR_xxx}
variables.
> To respond to my own post:
>
> The desired capability exists, tho it doesn't seem capable of handling
> my application. I've just discovered/tried the -F Obfuscate option.
> It seems to encounter a number of issues while trying to strip
> some modules (things that don't parse as expected, not my modules,
> but installed modules, including one or 2 core modules). It does
> reduce the size of the executable, but by only about 250K. Worse still,
> it apparantly breaks something, since the executable won't even start
> now (gets numerous
>
Others have reported problems with Obfuscate, but I have not tried it. I am one of
those "free code, obfuscation is evil" people :)
However, the purpose of Obfuscate and Bytecode is not to process pod. Size reduction
(if any) is an unplanned side effect.
upx (upx.sourceforge.net) will shrink the size of the exe, but won't help speed it up,
unless you are fetching the exe from slow media.
Alan Stewart
