Experiences with Exerb?

[Luis Lavena]

I'm dropping this here since there isn't too much information about
Exerb [1]

There is also RubyScript2exe [2] but this is different, since instead
of use stub executable to unpack your application in a temp folder it
replaces Ruby VM with a custom build that hook Kernel#require and some
other calls to make it run transparently without unpacking.

Ok, after the brief introduction, I'll like to know if there are users
out there that used Exerb and wich version of Ruby (last time I used
it was with Ruby 1.8.2/4).

Exerb 0.4.3 supports 1.8.6, but fails to compile with patchlevel 111
(which indicate it requires a previous release).

Documentation about this project is scarce, and all the docs are in
Japanesse (at least something more than README).

Thanks in advance for the feedback, looking forward to heard from
others about this.

Luis

[1] http://exerb.sourceforge.jp/index.en.html
[2] http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/rubyscript2exe/

 

[James Tucker]

I've had good experiences with small apps and exerb, a couple had extensions and strange require semantics, and exerb (mkexy) managed reasonably well.

Ensure that you do require / load all sources and extensions when you use mkexy, sometimes it can be prudent to make a command line or environment option to ensure that this happens. (Depending on your app)

We used 1.8.6 from the standard one-click IIRC, and it worked just fine.

Some stuff we've loaded without issue (off the top of my head):
- Camping
- Sockets + SSL
- win32ole
- various other pure ruby gems

I did have an example rakefile around somewhere which ran mkexy etc to perform a 'compile', but I can't find them. The process is simple however, again, if I remember correctly:

mkexy my_ruby_script.rb
# assuming all files loaded correctly on the above run...
exerb my_ruby_script.exy

start my_ruby_script.exe

Good luck!