Oh, I fully realize that *none* of this "self-extracting" nonsense is
going to be cross-platform by any means. For each variation of Unix
you'll need a seperate par binary, but its no worse than C. But Unix
really isn't a problem. Any Unix dist worth its weight in snot comes
with Perl.
The real use is for distributing to MacOS and Windows. That's much
easier. One binary for 95/98/Me, one for NT/2000, one for MacOS, one
for MacOS X and maybe one for DOS/3.1. It might seem like alot of
work, but its dirt cheap for cross-platform development. (Of course,
you'll still have to be careful about file operations and the like).
Perl gets *creamed* on this issue. Personally, I've had lots of ideas
for little utilities to help with office-work killed because all the
non-programmers run Windows and don't want to be bothered installing
Perl. No, its not a fight you can easily win.
Well... there is one part that will be cross-platform. The problem
of having Perl but not pun. That's simple enough, par can build an
archive with a minimalist version of pun with the par attached as
__DATA__ or something.
