Re: Fwd: Plans for GTK+ Bundles for win32 and win64?

[Kean Johnston <kean johnston gmail com>]

> In theory, I agree with what you're trying to achieve here. However,
> in practice I think there would be better places to direct your energy
> - keeping in mind Windows takes up about 2GB of disk space these days,
> 12MB of DLL's for each of the maybe 10 Gtk apps I have on Windows
While I agree with the status quo, I am trying to look ahead to a much 
brighter day when whole hordes of commercial developers use GTK because its 
just *THAT* easy for them to do so :) My intentions are part of my devious 
master plan to get more and more commercial-grade software available on 
Linux, and providing a trivial to use (MUCH more so than is currently the 
case with Qt) environment that's available on both platforms is a big part 
of making that possible.

As a proof of concept, just look at the kind of stuff Autodesk is producing 
for Linux, in part (I'm sure) because the barrier to entry to Linux 
development was significantly lowered by Qt. Being able to have apps like 
Maya or Softimage on Linux is a massive win. Come the day we can get things 
like ProTools, Cubase etc and I'll be a happy camper. I fully acknowledge 
that making the GTK portion shared won't necessarily help that goal, and 
that making it easy for an application vendor to simply bundle it privately 
will, which is why I want to make sure that both scenarios are possible.

> I don't want to demotivate you here, my point is just that there is a
> lot of work to be done to get Gtk+ 3 up to scratch on Windows (writing
> an entire theme engine, for example) so we need to be smart about what
> we spend time on.
True, but that's not my particular area of expertise, so I am trying to 
focus my energies where I believe I can make the biggest difference. Right 
now having an easily-buildable-with-only-native-tools set of sources, that 
can produce an installable archive that can either install as a shared 
system component or as a private set of libraries is my top priority. After 
that I am happy to spend the few free hours I have for working on this 
stuff in other areas and learning as I go along.

Kean