exerb, bruby and ruby 1.8.0

[oleg dashevskii]

Hello,

Today I set out to make an .exe file of my program (which uses FXRuby).
After using 1.8.0 .rbx files from exerb-cc-2.6.7 it went fine (not to
count that the resulting .exe file is over 5 MB). The real problem is
that my code can easily be extracted from the .exe (what a storage means
for real intellectual property, hehe).

But as seen from exerb docs, in 2.6.7 there's no support for bRuby (that seems
to at least partially solve my problem).

What can be done here?

 

[Javier Fontan]

Hello,

One posibility is to compress the executable with UPX or somethink like this. It's not really secure as it can be decompressed with se same tool, but your code can not be directly seen.

http://upx.sourceforge.net/

Bye

 

[oleg dashevskii]

Hello,

One posibility is to compress the executable with UPX or somethink like this. It's not really secure as it can be decompressed with se same tool, but your code can not be directly seen.

Oh, I tried PECompact, but in vain. The resulting file goes segmentation fault
Doesn't surprise me that much, because exerb itself deals with .exe
contents and here we go packing on top of that. Furthermore, all scripts and .so's are
just appended to the .exe and cannot be packed either.

 

[Xiangrong Fang]

Hello,

Please try compress the exerb rbx file then make your exe, if you make
your exe first, then compress, you WILL get segmentation fault.

Shannon

 

[Takashi & Kayoko Sano]

Hi,

Hello,



Oh, I tried PECompact, but in vain. The resulting file goes
segmentation fault
Doesn't surprise me that much, because exerb itself deals with .exe
contents and here we go packing on top of that. Furthermore, all
scripts and .so's are
just appended to the .exe and cannot be packed either.

According to Exerb's author, you can't compress executables
created by Exerb. But instead you can compress the ruby core,
extentions (.so) except for the ones dynamically linked by other
extentions, and your scripts (called 'archive' in Exerb)
respectively. (Don't ask me why because I'm just translating
what the author saids in his Japanese documents!)

If your purpose of compression is just preventing people
from casually looking at your code, compressing the archive
will suffice.

You can instruct Exerb to compress archive files by -z
command line option or 'compress yes' line in your
recipe file.

Hope this helps,

-------------------------------------
Technical Writer/Translator
Takashi Sano
E-mail: (e-mail address removed)
URL: http://www3.kcn.ne.jp/~tksano/
-------------------------------------