Hi Max,
sorry, I have mark the bug report as stalled. It's not going to happen,
but read on:
On Sun Oct 14 20:27:52 2007, MKANAT wrote:
Show quoted text> Right now the only platform-dependent prerequisite of PAR is
> Compress::Raw::Zlib, which is pulled in by IO::Compress::Zlib.
[...]
Show quoted text> Many systems already have "unzip" installed, and it would be nice if PAR
> could fall back on those if Compress::Raw::Zlib isn't installed. (Or
> Archive::Zip, for PAR::Repository::Client.) Or you could switch to using
> gzip, because all *nix distros have that available, though I imagine
> there's some good reason you didn't choose to go that way.
[...]
The short answer is: PAR itself cannot fall back to using anything but
Archive::Zip.
The long answer is:
- PAR offers an API of accessing files from the archive via the
Archive::Zip object.
- It only extracts stuff on-demand by default.
- This can't easily be changed without breaking expectations.
However, there are various fall-backs wherever possible.
- PAR::Dist can fall back to using unzip because its API doesn't expose
the underlying mechanism.
- PAR::Packer has recently picked up support for an experimental
unzipping module Archive::Unzip::Burst which it can use whenever fully
extracting the contents of a pp-packed binary executable.
I never chose to not go with gzip, but the original author of PAR did. I
suppose there are some good reasons, though. gzip needs tar to handle
the "file system" structure of the archive. tar implementations differ
from platform to platform. (GNU vs. POSIX) tar also has a structure
which doesn't work well with "random access". unzip would be the next
most widespread tool and one that should work the same everywhere.
So to get a fallback-option on unzip, you would have to resort to using
PAR::Dist only. That removes a lot of the flexibility but OTOH it's only
a pure-perl module. It doesn't have any hard dependencies. You can do
this with it:
use PAR::Dist;
install_par("
http://par.bugzilla.org/Some-XS-Module-VERSION.par");
However, this requires LWP::Simple. (Which is pure-perl, IIRC.)
You can also make it install into a local directory, but I gave you a
script to do that before, I think. See
http://search.cpan.org/dist/PAR-Dist/lib/PAR/Dist.pm#install_par
Best regards,
Steffen
