I'm trying to ship a self contained application to our customers. We are not allowed to dictate to the customer what versions of perl and installed packages they may have on their machine outside of our installation directory. They may not even have an installed perl. We certainly can't rely on them having compilers, etc. For us, the point of wrapping the apps is to provide a single self-contained binary for each tool that can be copied to any directory without external dependencies.
We don't know what directory they will install our application into when we build the application, so a single fixed cache directory doesn't really work unless it's settable after the fact. One approach I've considered is to have the installer unpack the .par file in a location within our install tree then re-par our applications with a new hard-coded cache location post-install. This would probably work well for some of our server components, but we have user tools that are likely to be accessed from machines other than the installation machine by way of a network mount. Those tools would have no fixed location to refer to, so would need to unpack to a per-user cache on startup. Basically, the way perlapp works seems to address all of our concerns, so I'd like to see if we can get equivalent functionality into par. I'm not suggesting abandoning other modes of operation, just adding the ability to use a per-user shared cache to avoid most of the overhead. --Scott -----Original Message----- From: Roderich Schupp [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2007 8:57 AM To: Scott Stanton Cc: Steffen Mueller; [email protected] Subject: Re: Improving speed of par app startup On Nov 28, 2007 5:42 PM, Scott Stanton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The intent isn't to avoid name clashes within a single application, it's > to avoid version clashes across applications with a shared cache > directory. Instead of creating a separate cache-<sum> directory for > every application, you can share a single cache directory as long as ...all your aplications come from the same source (and are built using the exact same build environment). But can't you have that already by specifying an explicit cache directory during pp'ing? If you're concerned with /tmp size and have lots of applications, why not just bite the bullet and install the necessary stuff on each client? Cheers, Roderich
