Re: What about official GTK+ installer for win32?

[Tor Lillqvist <tml iki fi>]

Tomasz Jankowski writes:
 > I want to make installer for my program and I'm not sure if adding copy of
 > GTK+ libraries to it will be a good idea.

Yes, it is.

I think experience has shown that it is futile to try to use a single
common GTK+ installation on Windows for all applications. One of the
reasons for this is that, despite the best efforts of maintainers, the
fact is that diferent versions of GLib, Pango and GTK+ for Windows can
and do differ in details in how various functionality is
implemented. (Partly because of bugs, partly because of perhaps
surprising side-effects of deliberate changes.) Applications that work
with one version might break with another.

The situation is different on Unix/X11 systems because the "match"
between especially GDK and X11 is so close. The Unix API is clean,
quite orthogonal, etc. For instance the GLib main loop and polling
functionality was basically implemented correctly for Unix from the
start and hasn't needed much change, while on Windows there has been
an ongoing evolution of the implementation, partial rewrites and
tinkering with details, in general improving it, but regrettably
occasionally causing needs for application code changes.

(Of course, if a bunch of applications that seem independendent to the
end-user, in fact are built and packaged for Windows by one entity,
this set of apps then can then use a common GTK+ as the
maintainer/packager keeps track of what version that common GTK+
should be. But the installers for these applications shouldn't then
try to force their copy of GTK+ as the one and only on the machine.)

The above is my personal view. Others obviously might think different.

--tml