John,
The shar paradigm is a great one. It offers self-extraction. It allows
mixed mode of text and binary. It can compress. It supports uuencoding.
It comes with documentation. But it is not written in Perl, is not portable
and is far more than 35 lines of code to write.
I propose I upload this simple self-extracting script as a first pass so
that we can have it evaluated as a group. How about the utility category
used in CPAN?
Archiving-Compression-Conversion
It is where you find Convert::UU for uuencoding/uudecoding, LZO or Zip
compression and other similar utilities.
I'd really like to see scripts come with testing similar to CPAN modules and
a multi-file format would lend itself to including the test.pl along with
the script.
Sincerely,
David
> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Porter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 07, 2000 2:27 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: Extract / Insert text files
>
>
> John Nolan wrote:
> >
> > That being said, however, I do not think it's the right way to
> > implement tarballs for the CPAN script archive.
> >
> > I think this would be an appropriate time for the mailing list
> > maintainer and/or the CPAN script archive maintainer to weigh in
> > with an opinion.
>
> I am neither, but I'll weigh in anyway. :-)
>
> MO: shar is the right paradigm. The downside is that shar is not
> portable. Perl is, of course; so it makes sense to make a perl
> equivalent of the shar utility. And it, and the scripts it
> generates, should not depend on anything other than a standard
> distribution of perl.
>
> Perl has uu*code built in, so that should take care of any
> binaries. Apart from that, a more-or-less straight port of
> shar to perl would be the way to go... IMHO.
>
> OTOH, MakeMaker is certainly capable of handling the installation
> and configuration of scripts, as much as of modules. The downside
> is that not all machines have a compatible make.
>
> --
> John Porter
>
> Papa! Es un gringo en la calle con su coche!
>
>
