Re: MS Windows packages and modularity

["Daniel Atallah" <daniel atallah gmail com>]

On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 12:01 PM, Allin Cottrell <cottrell wfu edu> wrote:
> A while back some app developers who have need of GTK+ on MS
> Windows, yet whose apps use only a subset of the available
> image-loaders, requested that the build of the Windows packages be
> made modular (as it was in the old days).  That way, one can slim
> down the packaging of one's app, skipping the redundant loaders
> along with their third-party dependencies (e.g. libtiff and
> libjpeg).
>
> This was done for a while (e.g. with the GTK 2.12.11 package), and
> I was grateful for that.
>
> But I see that the current GTK 2.14.4 package
> ( http://www.gtk.org/download-windows.html ) has reverted to a
> monolithic build, so that a gtk app won't start without having the
> tiff and jpeg libraries installed, even if they're never used.
>
> Was there a compelling reason for this reversion?  Any chance of
> getting a modular build again?  Thanks.

The reason for this change is that the 2.14.x series uses a new GDI+
based loader instead of the previous loaders.

If you run dependency walker on libgdk_pixbuf-2.0-0.dll, you'll see
that it doesn't depend on the various external libraries.

-D