Re: Meld 3.x for Windows missing C++ runtime

[Kai Willadsen <kai willadsen gmail com>]

On 26 January 2015 at 20:59, Christoph Brill <egore911 gmail com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I installed Meld on a fresh Windows installation. It would not start and
> only showed the message: "Error: The application has failed to start because
> the side by side configuration is incorrect please see the application event
> log or use the command line sxstrace.exe tool for more detail"
>
> I had to manually install the "Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistributable
> Package (x86)" from
> http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=A5C84275-3B97-4AB7-A40D-3802B2AF5FC2&displaylang=en
>
> Shouldn't this be part of the installer?

Unfortunately, I believe it can't be. See the following FAQ on
shipping these libraries with GPLed programs:
    http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WindowsRuntimeAndGPL
Meld itself isn't linking against the library, and I'm guessing
(though I haven't checked) that it's GTK+/Glib/etc. doing it, and
these are generally LGPL licensed, but... I'm just not confident about
shipping it, and would rather err on the side of caution.

Now if anyone can suggest a way to detect that these libraries are
missing and notify the user that they need to install them, that would
be cool and I'd look at doing that (one day).

cheers,
Kai