[Gambas-user] Gambas Future or what kind of Gambas we want.

[Kevin Fishburne]

On 01/21/2014 03:57 PM, martin p cristia wrote:
> Stepping in this old conversation to point out my take:
>
> -computers nowadays are fast enough to run a VM that's fast enough to
> run a normal aplication
>
> -If Benoit says it's complicated, what's left for us ??????????????????
>
> - so instead of trying to port gambas, why not making a installer that
> sets everything up for the inexperinced user??? Something like the
> SmallTalk approach.
>
> Making a small footprint VM+Linux+Gambas...they're all opensource, we
> can get rid of everyhing that Gambas dont need...even more, making a
> ligth weight Gambas or tagging components as "portable" and others "not"
> Say it's a 500MB installer? C'mon my android phone has "Hello world"
> like apps that weight 30MB, half giga is 15m download...even here in the
> ass of the world (small town Argentina)
>
> As for porting Gambas, it will be really good.  I have the time (but not
> the brain) to help anyone that joins the party and has the know-how for
> a start.

Sounds like a good idea to me. I'm planning on creating my own LiveCD to 
allow users to run my game on Windows and OSX. Not a great solution, but 
there aren't many options that the average user will stomach.

For your idea I think we'd need to set up a script or small executable 
that would:

 1. Install VirtualBox.
 2. Extract a premade vdi (Virtual Disk Image) containing only what
    Gambas needs to run its components (probably a lot).
 3. Extract a premade vbox file (VirtualBox Machine Definition) so
    VirtualBox knows about the VM and all its settings.
 4. Create desktop and menu shortcuts to launch the VM.

I remember Windows had self-extracting executables, like a zip file with 
an .exe extension. Perhaps there's an open source program that can 
create those on Windows and then run a script afterward? If so that 
would take care of everything except creating the Gambas VM. From my 
experience with doing the latter, the image always ends up around 7-8 
GB. I think getting the file size down to 1-2 GB is going to be tough.

-- 
Kevin Fishburne
Eight Virtues
www: http://sales.eightvirtues.com
e-mail: sales at ...1887...
phone: (770) 853-6271