Hi, I've just started using PAR and am really impressed at how well it does what it does, and how easy it makes redistributing script applications. This is my first post to this list and while I've looked over past postings I'll apologise up front if this idea has been discussed before.
I've written a small filter, in Perl naturally, which I'm dubbing pppp (the Perl Packager Pre Processor) which uses POD comments in a script to configure the packaging of that script. This serves two purposes: firstly it provides documentation in a script about how to package it, and what its dependencies are, and secondly it allows a script author to take on the maintenance of the PAR (and .exe) creation, which we are automating as part of an inhouse project to deliver Perl apps to the desktop. The script was created primarily out of a need to manually include Tk xbms, but is more generally applicable. My POD looks like this: --- BEGIN POD --- =head1 PAR Options The following options are intended to be machine readable to assist in PAR packaging of this script. =over 4 =item PAR --gui =item PAR --addlist=addlist_file.txt C:\temp\a_file1.txt;/a/path/to/a/file1.txt C:\temp\a_file2.txt;/a/path/to/a/file2.txt =back --- END POD --- Only '=item POD' clauses are processed. pod2html leaves this looking quite nice. The --addlist section is placed in an appropriate file, and used to supply additional files for packaging. I run pppp which creates additional files as necessary, and invokes pp to generate the packaged executable. I see no reason pp couldn't be extended to include this functionality. I just avoided fixing something which wasn't broken ;-) I'm happy to provide my source if it would be useful (it's not at all complicated), and either way I'd be grateful for any feedback, good or bad! Thanks in advance, Robin
