Can Shoes.rb Create Self-Contained Applications?

Question

It's encouraging that Shoes (the Ruby GUI framework) has excellent packaging functionality, but I'm concerned that it doesn't actually 'wrap' itself around created applications. Packaging for OSX outputs a shoes installer and a shoes file in a .app system. Is there any way that shoes could create a .app that contains shoes - that doesn't make you install shoes to run it?

I'm working on creating a tiny application - just a start button and a stop button for a subprocess, etc.

Answer 1

Hey, sorry I didn't see this question sooner.

I have good news, and I have bad news: you can absolutely do this, but there's no documentation, currently.

Hackety Hack is the biggest program that does exactly that: http://github.com/hacketyhack/hacketyhack

If you check out the build instructions, you run rake APP=/path/to/app and then rake APP=/path/to/app installer to build your own binary... but you'll have to do a bit of digging into the Rakefile to figure it out. I think that app.yaml is the only thing that's needed.