Re: [Ekiga-devel-list] ANNOUNCE - Ekiga 3.0.1 available

[Matthias Schneider <ma30002000 yahoo de>]

----- Ursprüngliche Mail ----
> Von: Luca Capello <luca pca it>
> An: Ekiga development mailing list <ekiga-devel-list gnome org>
> Gesendet: Donnerstag, den 23. Oktober 2008, 14:58:03 Uhr
> Betreff: Re: [Ekiga-devel-list] ANNOUNCE - Ekiga 3.0.1 available
> 
> Hi there!
> 
> On Mon, 20 Oct 2008 20:33:34 +0200, Damien Sandras wrote:
> > This is the first update the Scheherazade branch of Ekiga. We are still
> > working on improving Ekiga.net and will keep you informed about the
> > progress.
> [...]
> > Here is the list of changes:
> >
> > Windows build
> > * Fixed crash when echo cancellation is active
> > * Improved GTK installation by providing our own libraries
> 
> What's the reason for that?  I've already seen various projects
> duplicating effort in maintaining embedded GTK+ libraries: while
> Inkscape and Ekiga always install their own GTK+ version, GIMP and
> Pidgin check if the required version is already installed or not and let
> you choose [1].
> 
> Since now the GTK+ Project provides Windows binaries [2] (unfortunately
> not yet as an installer), wouldn't be better to depend on those binaries
> instead?  Or, since an installer is required, spreading the "GTK+ for
> Windows Runtime Environment" [3].
> 
> FYI, on two different XP machines where I installed Ekiga-3.0.1beta-7205
> and where GIMP-2.4 was already installed I got an error at Ekiga
> startup, solved by removing Ekiga, GIMP and any other GTK+ installation
> still present.  Unfortunately, I cannot reproduce it anymore :-(
> 
> Thx, bye,
> Gismo / Luca
> 
> Footnotes: 
> [1] this is what I understood from the tests I just performed
> [2] http://www.gtk.org/download.html
> [3] http://gtk-win.sourceforge.net/

Luca, 

we are not actually building our GTK binaries, but taking them from 

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/binaries/win32/gtk+

The "providing our own libraries" refers to no longer relying on a 3rd party 
installer. Instead, we now uncompress all GTK dlls and dependencies into
the ekiga directory. The reasons for no longer using the installer are the 
many problems experiencied.

The different installers installed the dlls into different paths. Now 
depending on the order of the directories in the PATH environment 
variable many strange issue were observed like having different, but 
API and ABI  incompatible versions of libglib with the same name.
Depending on the path order, very strange effects were noticed. Also,
there were some cases where some zlib dll brought by SW like matlab 
was located instead of the GTK runtime lib's dll, bringing up reports of
missing Visual Studio runtimes that have nothing to do with us. 

Not relying on an installer also removes the dependency to such when 
upgrading the libgtk version (it was not always easy to find a matching GTK 
installer to a specific lib version).

Relying on the binaries from the gnome ftp server should fix all of that problem
and gives us developers time to address real problems.

Matthias