This is a great idea, and I hope you will pursue it. The greatest needs are to formalize startup and shutdown (which appears to be SLOWLY happening anyway, but please help it along<g>) and to have a clean way to prepare an image for an end-user without locking out the developer.
Stripping unused code to get the total size down is a great idea, but it can be over done. My typical image runs at over 30 MB, which is big and begs for stripping. In Dolphin, I could obtain executables of 4MB down to 2MB with almost no effort; Object Arts and some users put what I consider to be unreasonable effort into going below that. I understand there is a place for very small executables, but I think we are missing far more important features (e.g. callbacks, OS threads, package system, printing framework, GUI editor) to justify expending a lot of effort on creating extremely small executables. Of course, it is your time and you can do what you think is best. IMHO, there is very little need to create a single file with image and vm. The end user cares about a desktop icon or menu item; it matters very little what is behind the icon. The tiny notepad.exe is often cited as an example to emulate, but look at its dependencies. A single file is a nice goal, but I suspect we would be better off with the following: (1) a nice wizard that allows one to save the image the way the developer wants it and then creates an optionally stripped image for the end user under a desired name; even getting a 40 MB image down to 4MB would be a big boost. (2) good support for installing and launching the deployed image with the platform vm. Innosetup is a nice way to do such things on Windows, and I have code that generates scripts for it. I recommend staying clear of the Windows Installer; it is complicated to the point of being dangerous, while Inno just gets the job done in understandable ways. My wrapper code for Innos Setup would have to be ported to Pharo, but that should be possible. Linux has .rpm and .deb to consider; maybe there are generic shell-script approaches to the problem?? Good luck! Bill -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of nullPointer Sent: Monday, July 19, 2010 3:39 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Pharo-project] Deployment on Pharo Excuse me for my poor english. I want implement a mechanism of deploy in Pharo. The objetive is obtain one file with VM and Image mergeds. I believe than in MACOS is easy, only is needed put the image file into the "VM" folder and create a zip with a link to APPs folder. In Windows the idea is merge VM and image in one file and create a classical windows installer. Exists some previous work do it for deployment? I see for example images "One click" for mac. Regards -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Deployment-on-Pharo-tp2293677p2293677.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project
