I've not given a lot of context, it's true : I'm trying to package a collection of Perl 5.8 scripts (actually the PerlPowerTools) as a single file, runnable anywhere and installable without knowledge of the Perl ecosystem (or with limited access rights).

For Windows, the obvious solution is to build an executable (no issue encountered so far). For other systems (most of them come with Perl installed), I see two inconvenients in building an executable as you suggest : 1) small source scripts (1MB) turn into a big executable (10MB) and 2) a different executable would be needed for every possible CPU, right? Please correct me if wrong, that's not my area of expertise. I agree with you that an executable solves many issues, but in this case they are non-existent, because the scripts are pure old Perl 5.8.

But maybe PAR::PAcker is not the right tool for that : what I did not understand is that an external PAR (not packed!) is needed to run a script packed with 'pp -P', and more confusion came because PAR seems to be shipped by default with macOS Perl and Strawberry Perl (even if not a core module). I thought the (uncompressed) Perl code present at the beginning of the packed file would be enough to extract the rest (Zip) transparently (again, please correct me if wrong).

Thanks!