On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 11:00 PM, Alberto Ruiz
<aruiz gnome org> wrote:
2008/10/6 Vlad Grecescu <b100dian gmail com>:
> Hello Gtk developers/users,
>
> I was wondering if, now that
gtk.org maintains a list of up-to-date Windows
> packages (binaries, dev-binaries and sources) it would be possible to make
> an installation kit out of them.
> Something integrated with an mingw/msys installer, for the developers.
There's been some discussion regarding this already, thing is, most
Windows developers use Visual Studio, so the real goal if we want to
engage Windows developer base is to do VS builds and provide an SDK
installer for it with project templates and stuff...
Until someone works out a maintanable way of delivering VS binaries,
this approach has to wait.
I think most of the people that use Gtk+ on Windows also use autoconf/automake (think Inkscape, Geany, Pidgin). Unfortunately they also use parralel Makefiles for win32.. having the opportunity to compile unmodified (vanilla) Gtk+ software in msys/mingw seems like a good idea to me.
Also, Visual Studio for new projects is another target, but I think the difference is weather you're mainly developing on WIndows and regulary checking if it works on Linux/*nix etc. or the other way around.
However, an easier approach in the meantime would be to provide
NetBeans or Eclipse plugins based on their C/C++ support with
MinGW/MSys, I think this would be a really big thing if it's well
maintained. Both IDEs are getting quite popular in quite some college
environments since the teachers don't need to teach yet another IDE
everytime they switch from one language to another (C/C++/Java/PHP),
we can reach a whole lot of people with something like that.
If I were you, I would mark that as my goal ;-)
Well:) I agree I do not know much about C/C++ IDE integration of NetBeans and Eclipse (I also heard it's good), I however also used Code::Blocks, Geany, CodeLite and they're ok too,.. but this is only a matter of "how fast can you update your Gtk+ developement environment":)
Mmm.. are you thinking using something like Eclipse's update process for updating Gtk+ too? (I think it would be an overhead)
> The problem is that there should be some kind of textual descriptions of the
> latest versions/latest URLs for both the binaries and the sources, on-line.
The easiest way that I can think of in the moment is to parse an ls of
the ftp directory where the stuff is. If you're interested on this, I
think that you should do a prototype installer first, no need to wait
for gnome sysadmins to setup something like that.
There is a zip bundle at the moment for Gtk+[0], it includes all the
dependencies, so maintaining an installer based on it it's not a big
deal since you don't have to track the version of the dependencies.
The ftp/ls idea is good. I think I will start tinkering with that. The zip bundle contains more software than actually updated every time, however the person who updates it could do less work by just keeping a text file around;)
meanwhile, I see no overlapping with Cody's MSM/WiX projects: they are just as useful to Visual Studioers
> So the name of the package, the version, the URLs for binary/dev/sources.
> (have a look at
http://www.mingw.org/mingw.ini for the inspiration)
>
> This would allow an installer to: automatically install runtime or
> developement files, *and automatically upgrade everything*. It would also
> allow 64-bit compiling in the future:D
>
> Well, what do you think?
> I can start myself an nsis project with this if we agree.
Make sure you hang around the #win32 irc channel at irc.gnome.org,
there is where all the win32 rock stars are.
;)
[0] ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/binaries/win32/gtk+/2.14/gtk+-bundle_2.14.3-20081006_win32.zip
--
Cheers,
Alberto Ruiz
