Re: Running an exe .............

[Tor Lillqvist <tml iki fi>]

> This means that even if we run the "exe" in a system, should it 
> have GTK+ installed? 

Of course. Plus the stuff GTK+ depends on. For GTK+ 2.2.x, that means
GLib, Atk, Pango, libiconv, gettext-runtime. If you use gdk-pixbuf to
load png, jpeg or tiff images, you will also need the respective
libraries libpng, libjpeg or libtiff.

> How can i distribute my "exe" to a customer who may not have GTK+?

Well, you cannot distribute just the exe. You have to distribute all
the dependencies, too.

Unfortunately there isn't any generally agreed upon package
distribution format/method for Windows. (Like rpm, dpkg on Linux,
pkginstall on Solaris, etc.)

There also aren't any generally agreed canonical Windows binary
distributions for common low-level libraries like libpng, zlib
etc. This means that you really cannot be sure whether a machine
already has some of them installed or not, and what version it might
be. I.e. the risk for DLL hell is always there, especially if
misguided installers have installed stuff in the Windows system
directory.

Not to mention that there might be binary incompatible DLLs with the
same name floating around, or binary compatible but differently
named...

For example, the gnuwin32 people (gnuwin32.sourceforge.net, my GTK+
binaries have been built to use their libjpeg, tiff, png etc
distributions) have changed the names of DLLs in some packages they
distribute *without* releasing new versions of packages that depend
on. (For instance, their libtiff wants a differently named libjpeg DLL
than they currently distribute. You need to make a copy. Sheesh.)

--tml