Re: [pygtk] Installation problems win32



Christian Robottom Reis wrote:
Well, this places a lot of burden on the application developer, who then
needs to keep track of which runtimes are kept up to date and which ones
are well distributed. It also forces him to justify and support the N
[potentially incompatible] distributions that are out there, because
users usually don't know or care the runtime is broken, "the app just
doesn't work!" Also, requiring every GTK+/PyGTK application user to
download and install Yet Another Distribution is harsh.

I think the application developers would pick one distribution to work with and preferably include the distribution with their app. I recently installed X-Chat on windows and was glad to see that it didn't require any separate gtk distribution -- I just ran the installer and it works. I almost wouldn't know it used gtk, except for some of the win32 differences I notice. IMHO, end users shouldn't need to care whether they're using a gtk based app or not.

There are going to be different runtimes out there because some will have bugs and have less features than others. It's a lot easier to support an app when you distribute the runtime with it because then you can reproduce & fix problems and then distribute the fixes.

Standardization would really help us here; it's hurting win32 adoption
of GTK+.

Where I differ is that I don't think standardization is the primary problem -- instead I think the problem is that it's difficult to compile, package, and deliver the complete chain of runtime libraries. I suspect Qt would run into the same issues if every Qt app required a separate shared runtime to be installed.

There's a difference between packaging for developers and end users. Developer's want something that will let them write applications and then distribute those applications to as many people as possible. End users want to be able to easily install an application (which usually means a single installer) and then to be able to use it.

Cheers,

John



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