Perl@PolettiX

After the previous post, I shipped the script and the related libraries to the recipient and slept as a baby. Just to discover that they didn't figure out how to use it properly!

The main issue is that geeks and technical people generally don't read the documentation. I admit, most of the times I don't do this as well. In this case, my good colleague saw a Perl script, made the too-simple-to-seem-true association between Perl and the Web and installed Apache! Well, as a matter of fact it is a web application, but I strived to make it self-contained and you end up with Apache?!?

Luck was that I was there some thirty minutes after to correct the problem and let Perl shine: "hey bro, it's a single program with an embedded web server!". That was the lucky part, anyway: the environment we're working into is particularly hostile, to the point that two machines in the very same network can't ping one another! Fortunately when I did use the program to make some tests the network connectivity was not that bad and we managed to do them.

Another thing that annoyed me a bit was that the script was not fully self-contained. Yes, I have to ship a hole tar.gz file... so I thought that it would be great to distribute a single script without anything more. One option is PAR, of course, but I always regretted to use it because you basically have to compile for a target architecture (at least in my understanding). In case of Pure-Perl stuff this does not make me happy.

Some time ago I had a similar problem that I solved with a script to bundle Pure-Perl modules inside a script. I put it in repository in repo.org.cz, for anyone to have a good laugh.