Re: Building and packaging for Windows

["Tor Lillqvist" <tml iki fi>]

> Well, I'm afraid of just downloading the zipfiles and replacing the dlls
> in my program with the new ones because I have no idea how they depend
> on each other (version problems maybe). Is that not a concern?

Well, there is no Linux-like package management on Windows where
installable packages would contain dependency information, "provides",
"obsoletes", "requires", "conflicts with" and whatnot metadata one can
put into .rpm and .deb files. So where do you suggest such information
should be stored and handled? As metadata inside exectuable
installers, and each installer would check that its dependencies are
fulfilled by existing packages, and store information about itself
somewhere (the Registry?) after installation?

Unfortunately any attempt at something like this (or for instance an
attempt to port RPM or dpkg technology to Windows) is more or less
bound to fail because for it to really work as well as package
management on Linux, it would require that *all* distributors of Free
and Open Source software for Windows would agree to use the same
package format, installer-building tools, and whatnot. (I mean,
including lower-level libraries like libjpeg, zlib, etc,) That will
not happen.

--tml