Erik,

Thanks for the pointers -- I had indeed looked at your projects, and
definitely considered using them. Given the large file size of the
binaries I'm including, though, as well as the fact that those
included binaries are themselves already compressed, I didn't want to
add another level of archiving to the process unless absolutely
necessary.

I do embed the full Ruby runtime, rather than simply packaging the
interpreter. This means I have to reproduce the functionality of the
normal interpreter, but it also means that for simple cases I don't
have to extract anything to the user's machine; I can just execute
scripts in-place from the binary.

I'm still experimenting at this stage, but this tool will be in
production use within the next few weeks, after which I'll try to talk
to my employer and see if we can get some of the code released.

Thanks for the advice.

-- 
Lennon
rcoder.net