Re: Good view on windows

[Tor Lillqvist <tml iki fi>]

> Is it possible to run the application on
> Windows without installing GTK+ redistributable package?  I guess yes.

You guess wrong, I'd say. You should bundle the GTK+ runtime, and any
other 3rd-party libraries needed, with your application. (As part of
its installer ideally.)

(I don't know why you point out "redistributable", by definition GTK+
is always "redistributable" as that is what its license requires.)

Sure, there are some people who distribute separate installers for
just GTK+ with the intent that the GTK+ they install would be the
"shared" one to be used by all GTK+-based applications that machine
then happens to have. I think most developers however agree with me
that this has proved to be not a good idea on Windows. The situation
is so different from Linux. I don't want to repeat myself, google for
arguments.

> Is it possible to use GTK+ themes by the same way,
> without installing anything (application must looks fine)?

What themes do you have in mind? The MS-Windows theme comes bundled
with GTK+ distributions (at least the one from ftp.gnome.org), you
just need to have a etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc file that takes it into use, or
call the gtk API in your app to take it into use. The "wimp" theme
engine used by the MS-Windows theme, and the "pixmap" theme engine are
part of normal GTK+ distributions. For themes that require other theme
engines you will have to bundle the engine then (and the other files
the theme uses)

> Additional
> libraries which are needed are GStreammr, XMLLib2 and MySQL client. The
> best way will be an installer which check is the following libraries
> already installed

Nope, I would advice not to do that. You can never be sure that the
versions are compatible etc. It just isn't the same as on some Linux
distro where there is a unified system-wide package management and a
reasonable expectation that the versions of various software in a
version of the distro fit together nicely.

Just bundle everything you need with your application, and install it
in the application's folder, with the DLLs in the same folder as the
application's executable. Don't try any "shared" installations. Disk
space is cheap.

If you disregard my advice and try to use already installed 3rd-party
software, you  are just asking for trouble for yourself (and for your
users).

--tml