VFS, Starkits and Starpacks

[Oleg Barenboim]

Hi,

I am new to Ruby. So far, I am really enjoying the language. But, I am
a bit concerned about packaging applications written in Ruby.

Has there been any thought to implementing something like Tcl's VFS (see
http://wiki.tcl.tk/2138)?

The VFS support allows for virtualizing the file system calls to more
naturally program things that are remote (HTTP or FTP) and local (zip
and tar files). Using this functionality, the Tcl community was able to
create starkits (originally with zip files and now with metakit
(http://equi4.com/metakit.html) files).

A Starkit (http://equi4.com/starkit.html) creates the illusion of a
"file system in a file" - on the outside, it's a single file, yet the
application code continues to see a complete directory of scripts,
extensions, packages, images, and whatever other files it needs.
Starkits can be multi-platform.

After the success of starkits, they were able to wrap up everything into
a single executable that they call starpacks (http://wiki.tcl.tk/3663).
This allows for the delivery of an application as a single file that,
for the most part, does not need to be unpacked to temporary locations
because the Tcl core has VFS that allows it to look introspectively into
the executable.

I am not bashing Ruby. I have looked at RubyScript2exe and think it is
a great start. It would be great if a more robust solution were
available to allow for clean packaging of Ruby applications.

Thanks,
Oleg

 

[Joel VanderWerf]

Hi,

I am new to Ruby. So far, I am really enjoying the language. But, I am
a bit concerned about packaging applications written in Ruby.

Has there been any thought to implementing something like Tcl's VFS (see
http://wiki.tcl.tk/2138)?

The VFS support allows for virtualizing the file system calls to more
naturally program things that are remote (HTTP or FTP) and local (zip
and tar files). Using this functionality, the Tcl community was able to
create starkits (originally with zip files and now with metakit
(http://equi4.com/metakit.html) files).

A Starkit (http://equi4.com/starkit.html) creates the illusion of a
"file system in a file" - on the outside, it's a single file, yet the
application code continues to see a complete directory of scripts,
extensions, packages, images, and whatever other files it needs.
Starkits can be multi-platform.

After the success of starkits, they were able to wrap up everything into
a single executable that they call starpacks (http://wiki.tcl.tk/3663).
This allows for the delivery of an application as a single file that,
for the most part, does not need to be unpacked to temporary locations
because the Tcl core has VFS that allows it to look introspectively into
the executable.

I am not bashing Ruby. I have looked at RubyScript2exe and think it is
a great start. It would be great if a more robust solution were
available to allow for clean packaging of Ruby applications.

Check out Mauricio Fernandez' file FS based on ruby's DATA feature:

http://eigenclass.org/hiki.rb?cmd=view&p=pure+ruby+compiler&key=block

If you just want to package a ruby app that doesn't contain native
shared objects (just pure ruby libs), you can package it as a single
ruby script file (which doesn't get unpacked to temp files at run time)
using darb:

http://redshift.sourceforge.net/darb/

Note that this doesn't allow you to package other data files, unless you
wrap them in ruby code (which is not necessarily a bad idea).