Feedback on my Win32 GTK+ Experience

[Micah Carrick <email micahcarrick com>]

Hey everyone. I built a little GTK+/ Libglade project on Win32 over this 
holiday primarily just so I knew how to do it. However, I also have a 
project in the queue which will require this knowledge. I'm going over 
my installation notes getting ready to put them up on my blog, however, 
I was hoping to get some feedback on some of the issues I had first.

I opted for MinGW and MSYS as I would like to be able to deploy Windows 
versions without the need for cygwin and I understand MinGW is the 
correct choice for this. I primarily used the links from Tor Lillqvist’s 
GTK+ for Windows page to copy the necessary libraries (and dev headers). 
I had problems with 2 of the packages.

1. libxml-2.0 from libxml2-2.6.30.win32.zip was missing the .pc file for 
pkg-config. I simply found this file in the sources elsewhere and copied 
to C:\MinGW\lib\pkgconfig\libxml-2.0.pc. Is this normal?

2. zlib from zlib123-dll.zip had a couple of things. First, I had to 
copy zlib1.dll to my bin/ directory. Secondly, the pkg-config files used 
-lz as the linker flag, and thus I had to copy /lib/zdll.lib to 
/lib/libz.a. The USAGE file said to rename zdll.lib to libzdll.a which I 
ALSO did to ensure it works either way. Is this right? Why isn't it 
libz.a already?

Once I had it working, I wanted to figure out how I might deploy the 
application. As I understand it, I can simply write my installer the 
same way I did back in my Windows programming days and deploy it with 
the DLL files necessary as round in the /bin dir. I found that I can 
copy these to C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\ on a target system which does not 
have cygwin or MinGW or anything else and my GTK+/Libglade application 
runs fine. I'm assuming this is what I would do to deploy a GTK+ windows 
application (using some kind of installer such as Nullsoft or Inno Setup 
making sure not to overwrite newer files).

3. Is copying the .DLL dependencies to the system (\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32) 
directory appropriate for the deployment of GTK+ applications on Win32? 
I know it "works", but is that the standard convention?

Thanks to anyone with the time to respond. I appreciate the help I've 
gotten thus far. Being limited on time I don't have much more time to 
research and I don't want to mislead readers of my blog. Not to mention, 
I would be more adept at helping people with their win32 quesions on 
http://www.gtkforums.com

--
- Micah Carrick

 Developer - http://www.micahcarrick.com
 GTK+ Forums - http://www.gtkforums.com