Re: Makeing librsvg work (bizp2.dll missing)

[Michael Torrie <torriem gmail com>]

Freddie Unpenstein wrote:
> That sounds straight forward enough.  And a hell of a lot better than the current situation.

I just checked the latest pidgin installer and indeed they do operate
this way.  However their GTK runtime just uses the major version number,
so it installs to C:\Program Files\Common Files\GTK\2.0 for all versions
of 2.x.  At first glance this would seem to be okay as GTK is supposed
to be ABI compatible across backwards from newer 2.x versions to older
ones.  In practice there can be issues though.  In past years, Gaim and
Gimp for windows actually had different versions of GTK that they
needed, and with this common scheme there ended up being conflicts.  IE
Gaim would run but Gimp wouldn't.  In linux we could solve this by
having versions stored with their full version number, and symlinking
the latest one to 2.0 for programs that don't need to know or care.  But
in Windows you can't symlink.

So if you choose to go this route, be aware that your GTK runtime could
cause Pidgin (or other programs using a common GTK runtime) problems and
vice versa.  Hence the conventional wisdom to just bundle the runtime
with each app.  And actually issues like theming and OS integration
shouldn't be a problem as on Windows there ought to only be one theme
for the app:  the Windows look and feel.  Users shouldn't know that the
app is GTK-based; it should just appear to them to be a windows app.