Re: Compiling for Windows [Was: argv revisited]

[Allin Cottrell <cottrell wfu edu>]

On Tue, 3 May 2016, Dave Howorth wrote:

> On 2016-05-03 16:57, Florian Pelz wrote:
> > I'd like to have one standard GTK+ installer for the GTK+ DLLs etc. that
> > can be downloaded and installed from other installers, so there is just
> > one GTK+ installed on Windows instead of one copy of perhaps different
> > versions of GTK+ for each application.
>
> That's been a longstanding desire of many people. The other side of the 
> argument of course is that all the applications have to be compatible with 
> that particular version of the libraries, which has sometimes proven to be 
> problematic even when the libraries ship with Windows. Expecting every 
> application to be updated every time there is a library update is not 
> realistic. It's not like a linux distro where the distro can update and 
> recompile all the dependencies itself.

Yep, Florian's desire is a "natural" one from the point of view of 
anyone used to Linux but unfortunately it's totally impractical on 
MS Windows. It's a real No-No for any third-party package to install 
DLLs into system directories on Windows; this would likely break all 
sorts of things.

It may seem like a terrible waste of disk space to install multiple 
per-application copies of GTK, but you just have to get over it. 
Basically the same on Mac OS X.

(I might note: even on Linux, GTK updates are not necessarily 
harmless. For example, updating from GTK 3.18 to 3.20 breaks emacs 
and gnumeric; they still run, but they're damaged.)

Allin Cottrell