Daniel Carrera wrote:
>
> Hello Rubyists,
>
> I was hoping to hear some thoughts on the distribution of applications
> made with Ruby.  Say I make a GUI app with wxRuby.  I am not guaranteed
> that the user will have wxRuby, or even have Ruby at all. I want to make
> it as easy as possible for other people to run it.
>
> I thought that I could distribute my app as a zip file which would
> contain a copy of ruby for the intended platform, as well as all the
> libraries, and of course my Ruby program.  The zip would also contain a
> shell script which would set up the appropriate Ruby environment and run
> the application.  Something like this:
>
> #/bin/sh
> #
> # myprogram -- This is the file that the user actually runs.
>
> RUBYLIB="."
> PATH="."
>
> ruby my_ruby_prog.rb
>
>
> I'm sure that it's possible to do something like that for Windows also.

I already do this for the Windows distribution of FreeRIDE, except that I
use the NSIS installer instead of a zip file. This gives me more control
than I can get with a zip file.

Curt

> The user would simply unzip the file and click on "myprogram", which is
> the above shell script.  So it would be a zero-install program.
>
> Would this work the way I expect?
>
> My distribution zip file could contain a directory for every
> platform that
> is supported.
>
> Thoughts?
> --
> Daniel Carrera | PGP: 6643 8C8B 3522 66CB D16C D779 2FDD 7DAC 9AF7 7A88
> Math PhD. UMD  | http://www.math.umd.edu/~dcarrera/pgp.html
>
> Weekly Smile:
>         There are 10 types of people in the world...
>         Those who understand binary -  and those who don't.
>
>