Re: [pygtk] Installation problems win32

[John Ehresman <jpe wingide com>]

Christian Robottom Reis wrote:
> Well, this places a lot of burden on the application developer, who then
> needs to keep track of which runtimes are kept up to date and which ones
> are well distributed. It also forces him to justify and support the N
> [potentially incompatible] distributions that are out there, because
> users usually don't know or care the runtime is broken, "the app just
> doesn't work!" Also, requiring every GTK+/PyGTK application user to
> download and install Yet Another Distribution is harsh.

I think the application developers would pick one distribution to work 
with and preferably include the distribution with their app.  I recently 
installed X-Chat on windows and was glad to see that it didn't require 
any separate gtk distribution -- I just ran the installer and it works. 
 I almost wouldn't know it used gtk, except for some of the win32 
differences I notice.  IMHO, end users shouldn't need to care whether 
they're using a gtk based app or not.

There are going to be different runtimes out there because some will 
have bugs and have less features than others.  It's a lot easier to 
support an app when you distribute the runtime with it because then you 
can reproduce & fix problems and then distribute the fixes.

> Standardization would really help us here; it's hurting win32 adoption
> of GTK+.

Where I differ is that I don't think standardization is the primary 
problem -- instead I think the problem is that it's difficult to 
compile, package, and deliver the complete chain of runtime libraries. 
I suspect Qt would run into the same issues if every Qt app required a 
separate shared runtime to be installed.

There's a difference between packaging for developers and end users. 
Developer's want something that will let them write applications and 
then distribute those applications to as many people as possible.  End 
users want to be able to easily install an application (which usually 
means a single installer) and then to be able to use it.

Cheers,

John