Re: Portability and distribution with Gtk+ 1.3

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

On Tue, 17 Apr 2001, Arnaud Charlet wrote:

> > > Also, it is currently not possible to build gtk without having libpng
> > > (well for the same reason, the embedded png images).
> > 
> > Sorry missed this.  Has libpng really been giving you portability problems
> > though?
> 
> zlib definitely has, as explained in my message. zlib does not even have
> a configure, and has no provision for building shared libraries.
> 
> Also, the dependency on libpng and zlib is a run time dependency, there is
> no simple way to link these statically, or is there ?

If you compile the PNG image loader into gdk-pixbuf, and statically link
gdk-pixbuf to your app, you could use a static libpng/zlib.  Note that the
downside of including the modules is that all apps must be linked to these
extra shared libraries.

By having them as dynamic loaded modules, the actual app doesn't need to
know about the extra libraries, and extra modules could be added to the
system later without needing to recompile the apps to take advantage of
them.  This also reduces the number of shared libraries that need to be
loaded at startup, which reduces app start time.

James.

-- 
Email: james daa com au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/