Re: Portability and distribution with Gtk+ 1.3

[Arnaud Charlet <charlet ACT-Europe FR>]

> 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.

I guess you are referring to the
--disable-modules --with-included-loaders=png
options when configuring gtk+

Also, there is still the issue of being able to build zlib automatically/easily,
which is currently a challenge (yes, building zlib manually is not very
complicated, but in an environment with several systems and automated
builds, this is an other story).

Embedding zlib into libpng, or making zlib a first class citizen would
ease this task if we're going to require zlib and libpng systematically
to build gtk+ as seems to be the case.

> 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.

Yes, but how do you install such an application on systems that do not have
the png loader installed ? If there a way to change dynamically the prefix
where such libraries will be found (e.g an environment variables) ? This
seems highly desirable if not already provided.

Arno