Hi Roderich, hi list,
I'm sorry that this reply took so long. I wanted to get Audrey's input
on this and I was away for a few days.
Roderich Schupp schrieb:
[...]
Another observation point: when you install PAR on Debian (package
libpar-perl),
parl doesn't have any modules packed in (that's because the executable
gets stripped during Debian packaging which discards everything simply
appended to the executable).
But you can pp scripts just fine, the necessary modules are taken from the
environment at pp time. (Of course, this Debian parl is no longer a
self-contained
perl loader, it only works when all necessary modules are present on
the system.)
Audrey and I can see two ways to improve the situation.
a) link in C libzip to do the extraction. That way, parl wouldn't need
any Perl at all just for the extraction of the .par
b) add an additional loader, say "pp-parl" which is akin to debian's
stripped parl. That pp-parl would be used by pp.
Both solutions would solve the binary incompatibility issue which is
bound to crop up a lot in the future still. Solution a) might involve
some performance benefit and just feels "Right".
My problem is that my C is weak and I doubt I could implement any of the
two solutions.
Roderich, you showed me a proof-of-concept reimplementation using self
extracting libzip. Would you think you could modify the parl building
process to use libzip instead of the corresponding Perl XS modules? Or
if not, would somebody else like to jump in and help?
Of course, if you (plural) think the libzip approach is too difficult to
implement or just not worth the effort, I'd also be thrilled to see the
problem solved using b).
Steffen
