RE: [tcltk-perl] Tcl::Tk and Tcl/Tk files within Perl installation

[Jan D. <ja...@Ac...>]

On Tue, 12 Oct 2004, Konovalov, Vadim wrote:
> While playing with Perl and Tcl::Tk module on Win32, I discovered
> that it is relatively easy to build Tcl.dll (derived from Tcl.xs)
> that contains entire Tcl/Tk binaries. (all my experiments are on
> Win32 for now)
>
> I built tcl and tk statically, and then specified those libraries in
> Makefile.PL, so I got large Tcl.dll and it worked.
>
> It was easy to arrange so that Tcl/Tk gets all scripts from zipped
> archive "tcltk.zip"
>
> So I ended with about 3 or 4 files for entire Perl + Tk. Adding Tix
> makes only one file more (tix8184.dll) and tcltk.zip becomes a bit
> larger. All pure-Tcl extension go to that "tcltk.zip"

All of the above sounds pretty cool.  This will make it a lot easier
for people to use Tcl::Tk without having to install a whole Tcl
installation.

> I did it further: after few touches in Perl's makefile it is possible
> to embed extension into perl.dll (it was possible earlier, and I
> mostly restored and extended such a possibility)
>
> So I have 2Mbyte perl58.dll that contains Perl itself, Tcl/Tk, and
> some Perl extensions (Compress::Zlib for example).

I don't understand the value of this later part.  Why would you want to
do this?  The big advantage of DynaLoader is that you no longer need
to statically link extensions into core Perl (except for DynaLoader
itself, of course).  Am I missing something?

Cheers,
-Jan