Re: Updated GTK+ 2.24.5 binaries (and bundle)

[Maarten Bosmans <mkbosmans gmail com>]

2011/7/23 Andrea Bolognani <eof kiyuko org>:
> The gnome-win32 (or whatever it ends up being called) mailing list
> somebody was proposing eariler in the thread would probably speed up the
> process of reaching a consensus about similar issues.

Hear, hear.

> As far as I’m concerned, what I would love to have as part of the GTK+
> bundle -- assuming we still want to call it GTK+ bundle: expanding it to
> also include some other parts of the GNOME platform would probably make
> sense -- is something similar to a simple package manager.
>
> Application packagers should be able to integrate an arbitrary subset of
> the GTK+ bundle into their application’s installer; libraries should be
> installed in a globally managed location, so that three application
> using GKT+ would be able to share a single copy of the library, and if
> one of the three applications ships a GTK+ version that is newer than
> the one used by the other two while still being compatible, the library
> would be updated.

As I also noted in the just updated wiki-page, that approach has been
tried before and AFAIK is currently abandoned. Gtk applications are
supposed to come with there own Gtk libraries. Doing that globally
causes all kinds of problems. Remember that some applications might
expect the Gtk libraries to be a specific versions or to be compiled
by a specific compiler. These are all things that can be tightly
managed in a Linux distro, but not in the Windows world.

Of course the goal of proper package management on a broken OS is a
noble one and there are already several projects trying to achieve
that. I don't think, however, that Gtk should invent something here.

On the other hand, proper dependency tracking is important to allow
the application developer to decide which binaries he needs to package
with his application installer. The current situation on the ftp site
is that you should either use the all-in-one bundle or hunt down all
the separate zipfiles that are needed. That situation should be
improved.

> This process should be as transparent as possible, so that the user
> doesn’t need to worry about it. A simple GTK+ Updater to keep libraries
> up–to–date would be the icing on the cake.
>
> Am I spoiled by the 6+ years I’ve been using Debian exclusively? Probably.
> Do I think this would greatly improve the current situation with respect
> to application either shipping their own version of GTK+ or requiring
> users to manually install the GTK+ bundle? You bet.

Sure, packaging is one of the strengths that Linux distributions have
over Windows.

Maarten