I'm happy with
this apps, but ...
at the moment under system->software there are three GTK+ Libraries
installed,
What is "system->software"? You mean the "system" subfolder of the
Windows folder? There should be no GTK+ there. (And not in system32
either.) If there is, some installer is doing a very ugly thing and
needs to have its wrists slapped.
No i mean system/preferences->software where you can uninstall your
applications. Sorry I just don't know how it's called
the right way in English because im on a german system.
And what about
the GTK+ apps bundled with their own gtk in their own folders.
That is the how it should be.
Ok I understand, I didn't know this was the standard way.
And wich gtk
library does a certain application use when i start it now.
Unless some badly written application installer puts the GTK+ stack
DLLs in the system32 or system folder under the windows folder, each
application uses the GTK+ stack bundled with it. Either by having the
GTK+ stack DLLs in the same folder as the application's exe file, or
by using a registry entry that makes the application's exe files use
GTK+ from a specific location.
As there is no centralized package management (as in a Linux machine
running a specific distro), each application packager in effect is a
different "distro" that distributes the version of GTK+ (and other
3rd-party libraries) that they know fits their application. GTK+ is
from Windows's point of view a 3rd-party library.
Ok so the real problem is then the applications and the way they work
with gtk.
For example Pidgin didn't use it's own GTK library (GTK 2.14.7 rev A or
something like that), but used another one(Gtk 2.16),
that was installed with another application. I don't remember wich one
this was. This got me some buggy menu style.
Should there be environment variables for the GTK on windows?
And two of the installed GTK library's have folders in C:\Program
Files.
From the view
of a user this is realy confusing.
Huh? A typical Windows user or a GTK-using application does not and
should not need to know what GTK+ is, and that the application uses
it, or that on a Linux box there is just one system-managed GTK+
installation.
It's people with some experience of Linux that have the misguided
conception that Open Source packages on Windows should somehow be
installed like they are on Linux, i.e. system-wide, and thus find it
confusing that there can in fact be several installations of some
3rd-party library, one per application that bundles it.
The first GTK application i used was gimp, and I had to install gtk
seperatly when I started using it.
Many applications have installers with "with-GTK" in the name. So some
users on Windows probably know about it.
But I'm on your side. Best way would be, if people wouldn't even have
to know...
And yes probably you are right about my experience with Linux,
its just to comfortable to have a single package, that gets updated
independently.
It would be
really nice to have a standardized gtk installer.
Why not start the discussion with something more basic, like zlib? How
many copies of zlib code do you think exist on a Windows machine with
a typical mix of freely available software installed? Firefox includes
it, it's in OpenOffice.org, and surely in a bunch of other widely used
software. (Presumably it is in some disguise also in Windows itself,
even if the zlib API as such is not offered as a public documented API
by Windows.) Ditto for libjpeg, libpng, expat perhaps, etc. Now, once
you have convinced these projects to have a standardized installers
for these libraries, let's get back to GTK+...
And if an
application bundles it's gtk library with it's installer, the
installer should be able to check if there is already
a library installed and which version.
Trust me, this just doesn't work. It is less pain if each application
(or each person/company having control of their own installer(s))
bundles an own copy.
The other
problem with gtk on Windows is, that a lot of people tell me, that
it still looks alien on the window platform.
Have you tried using the ms-windows theme?
Sure it's standard bundled with all the GTK applications I know for
Windows.
I told you, I don't feel the apps to be alien, others do.
Maybe it's the icons. I don't know.
--tml
Ok, thanks for the clarification. I see the error in my thoughts now.
