On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 10:44:39AM -0700, Eric Wilhelm wrote:
# from Bryce Harrington # on Thursday 27 April 2006 10:20 am:
Hmm, frozen binary packages sounds like overkill in this case.
Yeah, but a dead dragon is still dead. Doesn't matter how you slay it.
Sure, but I think the difficulty in this case may be higher - or at least, when I've tried it myself I got stuck on various issues. But that was Linux, not Windows. Anyway, if you've done it before and have the process down, and are confident it can be done easily, then yeah, it could be the best approach.
Do you rely on any C Perl modules?
The XML modules can be C for better speed. The XAR code may ultimately end up with some C in it.
My point is mainly that it is much easier to just ship a frozen binary if it reduces the installation complexity. Given the choice between a long download and anything involving a shell, most windows users will let the modem do the hard work.
Yeah, well I guess the good news is that there's a few options. Shipping as binary would be a nice advancement; it'd eliminate whole classes of potential incompatibility bugs, and make the converters work even on Windows machines where Perl isn't installed. So that's worth trying first; if it doesn't work, there's other possible solutions (with different sets of trade-offs).
Bryce