Re: Portability and distribution with Gtk+ 1.3

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Arnaud Charlet <charlet ACT-Europe FR> writes: 
> Understood. Of course, having more documents explaining what is the current
> state, and what is expected would help, as there some work in the area
> (done or in progress) ?

I think we just haven't thought about it too much yet, so it's not
written down. That's why I'm saying it would be helpful to try and
get a statically linked app working, and make a list as you go of what
is broken.
 
> Well, having everything included in the .a will also mean that generated
> executables will be huge, will is not a negligible point for statically
> linked executables. I guess the --with-included* options address part of this
> concern (even if again, this is a configure time option, which is not
> very flexible since it is not practical to reconfigure and rebuild the
> "Gtk world" again and differently for each application and on each target.
> 

Right, I just don't see much solution to that tradeoff,
however. Either a) you put the functionality in a dynamically-loaded
module or b) you remove the functionality (don't support JPEG, don't
support Arabic, etc.) or c) you have a big binary containing all the
functionality. I can't think of a fourth option that gets the best of
all worlds. a) seems best for general-purpose GTK usage. b) might be
appropriate for a specific limited-purpose app, but Arabic, Korean,
etc. users would be upset if we did it by default. c) seems like it
will cause a lot of complaints about bloat.

Havoc