ExifTool without PAR packer is cleaner

[lbo]

in an earlier thread, I mentioned setting PAR_GLOBAL_TEMP to avoid PAR/pp unpacking ExifTool to a cache directory in %temp%. But this causes severe problems so don't use PAR_GLOBAL_TEMP!

I asked in the par@perl.org mailing list for advice but the result was unpleasant: The current maintainer of PAR wrote that it is "Bullshit advice" to make exectuables write protected for normal users. So we are all stupid putting our applications in the protected %programfiles% directory?

Later, I found more problems with the PAR approach, e.g. maintenance tools "cleaning" files from %temp%. And really awful code, way too complicated, mangling parameters and spawning processes for nothing.

So I spent some time in the last weeks to liberate PAR archives from the ugly bootloader.

The result is a small exe doing the same as the trivial "perl.exe" shipped with the usual Perl distributions, only inserting the path of the Perl script as additional parameter to RunPerl().

This avoids unpacking at runtime which makes no sense in my opinion.

I provide sources and executables at https://oliverbetz.de/pages/Artikel/Portable-Perl-Applications The  download contains also unparx.cmd to convert exiftool easily to a unpacked version.

It's still "beta", and I don't know whether Phil will use it one day, but I'd love to hear your comments right now.

Oliver

[lbo]

BTW I'm using (testing) it with IMatch and it seems to work.

Less entries in the task manager / Process Explorer, though: