Native Exiftool without PAR

[lbo]

Hi Mario,

you know that I started last summer to provide a native ExifTool package for Windows avoiding PAR's "issues" described in detail on my site: Brittle, hairy bootstrapping, unpacked files neither protected nor checked for integrity, unpacking to temp like common malware and so on. In my opinion it's a can of worms and it doesn't provide any benefit especially in the IMatch environment.

Changing the runtime folder with PAR_GLOBAL_TEMP as discussed in https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php?topic=10951.msg58453#msg58453 solves a small part of these problems but brings new problems.

BTW: The ActiveState license got very restrictive in the last years regarding commercial use. That's another reason why I chose Strawberry Perl - in addition to ActiveState's lazy maintenance.

My version is now linked for a while from https://exiftool.org/, gets roughly 1500 downloads per month and no complaints from users (besides McAfee false positives caused by the Inno Setup installer). It is also distributed with other Windows software using ExifTool.

This positive feedback and the tests I do (ExifTool selftest plus own tests) before releasing a new version demonstrate that my subset of Strawberry Perl is complete and compatible with ExifTool. I'm using it since months with IMatch.

Since my ExifTool avoids unpacking to temp and resides in a protected folder, it's less prone to complaints from antivirus software.

Do you have any reservations against eliminating the PAR packed version of ExifTool and using a cleaner Perl call (without the PAR overhead) instead in IMatch?

I don't even ask for using my (trivial and open source) launcher/wrapper code: I made this to provide a convenient and fully compatible exiftool.exe replacement. You might prefer to call perl5xx.dll directly. OTOH my wrapper avoids code changes in IMatch.

The main thing (read "work") about the generic Perl ExifTool is to get a suitable subset of Perl (to avoid 100MB bloat) and to add the needed libraries (dealing with broken selftests. I used PAR to create an initial subset and cross-checked with procmon.

Let me know if you are interested in any support.

Oliver

[Carlo Didier]

... unpacked files neither protected nor checked for integrity, unpacking to temp like common malware and so on. In my opinion it's a can of worms and it doesn't provide any benefit ...

I fully agree. In our company, I have to battle with this stupidity every day. More and more appliocations, even from Microsoft, behave like that. Makes it extremely difficult to maintain a secured environment.