"compufriend" <compufriend at freemail.absa.co.za> is widely believed to have written:

> If and When I start deploying, is there a way that I will be able to create
> a distribution package in the form of a selfextracting exe for M$ apps? If
> not, quick info please on the lowdown of setting up my app for distribution
> to +-1000 users (I've got big plans - I think).
The simplest answer that I know will work is to bundle a VM and image
(with all the usual shrinking, custom startup etc stuff) into whatever
your platform uses as such an archive (Macs use sea's, Windows
presumably has some self extracting variant of .zip, Acorn has
SparkPlugs, unix would be happy with .tgz etc) and thereby utilise OS
normal tools.

As Peter remarked, it is supposed to be possible to bind your image file
to the VM (Smalltalk saveAsEmbeddedImage) but I'm not convinced it works
adequately yet. It _should_, but I've never been able to make one
myself. At least, not one that actually starts up again later!

If you really want to get sneaky, it would be quite feasible to embed
the image in a compressed format and expand it upon startup; Ian did
something like that in the unix vm a while ago.  For a while, long ago,
VisualWorks could do it too.

tim
-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Strange OpCodes: EF: Emulate Fireworks