Re: Redistribution of GTK DLLs

[Chris Angelico <rosuav gmail com>]

On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 6:19 PM, Tristan Van Berkom
<tristan upstairslabs com> wrote:
> Since these particular LGPL sources are already made available by
> other parties (i.e. GTK+ & friends by GNOME etc) - I believe
> that you do not need to host these files directly - but must somehow
> at least link to these sources when distributing your app

It's not strictly a matter of linkage. Here's the deal:

1) My code is written in Pike, a high level language. So my
application is all plain text. You can see it all here:
https://github.com/Rosuav/Gypsum

2) The implementation of Pike is C code. In its source form, it's also
plain text. But Pike is GPL/LGPL/MPL, so linking against an LGPL
library is nice and easy.

3) Pike for Windows works fine with 2.24.10. I've tested it and all's
working fine. But that's me personally downloading the GTK DLLs and
dropping them in.

The very easiest solution for my users would be for me to distribute a
.ZIP file of eighteen DLLs, which my app can fetch and deploy. But
that would require me to make the source of those DLLs available, and
AFAICT pointing to gtk.org does *not* suffice.

The next best would be to write something that fetches the binaries
from gtk.org and deploys them. And that's where I started reading a
whole lot of GPL FAQs about bundled installers, and things start to
get messy.

ChrisA