Re: Fwd: Plans for GTK+ Bundles for win32 and win64?

[Alberto Ruiz <aruiz gnome org>]

2011/9/8 Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com>

only allow downloading of separate packages. What I wished we had years ago when I was developing on Windows was an executable which installed GTK+ on the system for all apps (so I didn't have to package gtk+ inside my own project).

That's a really bad idea for several reasons. First, we don't have the resources to test ABI compatibility on windows, there has been cases where some versions have crashed windows apps.

Second, Windows is not as good at managing shared .dlls as Linux is. It can become a nightmare. You need to either wire up the Side by Side plumbing or mess with %PATH% to get things right, and both approaches have their own set of problems.

In the Qt world and other toolkits, most people just bundle their dependencies. That's the standard and the right thing to do on Windows. Application developers are in charge of delivering a Gtk+ (and other deps) version that works for their app.

Third, and the most important. Windows has no package manager. You should not delegate on users the responsibility of making sure that a working copy of GTK is installed. This is annoying enough with Java.

 

A .zip bundle (and maybe some facilities to shove that into your app installer) is the best approach for now IMHO.

If there is consent amongst the team and this is available, I can set up the gtk.org pages for this.

--
Regards,
Martyn

Founder and CEO of Lanedo GmbH.

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-- 
Un saludo,
Alberto Ruiz