> > > This stirred up another idea: what if we could distribute
> > > components as zip files? require would then need to look
> > > at these, too. I don't oversee all implications yet, but
> > > it might be worth thinking a bit more about this as this
> > > could make deployment easier.
> > 
> > What real-life demands could be better satisfied by this?
> > For the Windows platform, there is rubyscript2exe, for the
> > others, there are rakefiles, gems,... I don't say these
> > work perfectly, but they are on the right path for making
> > installing packages painless, aren't they?
> > 
> > And yet there are no such huge packages for which the
> > compression gained by zipping would be a major benefit.
> > Or...?
> 
> You're probably right. Gem is far more convenient than
> downloding a zip and placing it somewhere and it does use
> compressed files during transportation AFAIK. IMHO the major
> advantage would not be compression but bundling of several
> files into a single physical entity. But, yes, I guess gems
> do that better.

If you're interested in bundling several files into a single,
runnable file (and you are...), you might want to read the
following sites:

 http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/tar2rubyscript/index.html
 http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/distributingrubyapplications/index.html

gegroet,
Erik V.