Re: Install GTK on windows using no official installers

[Tor Lillqvist <tml iki fi>]

David J. Andruczyk writes:
 > Beware that doing so (incorporating a "private" GTK+ release intro
 > your installer) will mostly likely BREAK or screw up ANY OTHER GTK+
 > apps on the box..

How could it, if the private GTK+ installation included with an
application touches nothing else? If the application's exe file(s) are
in the same folder as the GTK+ etc DLLs, not even PATH has to be
handled in any way as DLLs will always be searched first in the folder
where the exe is, before looking in the system32 and windows folders,
and PATH.

 > Users report that if they had gaim installed, this breaks things
 > horribly.

That is then exactly because gaim does *not* use a private GTK+, but
attempts to install/use a shared one.

 > They can't run my SW with gaim's GTK+ as it is missing gtkglext,
 > and cairo dll.s, and instlaling the sladewin32.sf.net runtime
 > doesn't resolve it as gaim's "privatized" gtk+ screws up the rest
 > of the system except for itself.

I really doubt gaim's GTK+ can be said to be "privatized". If it was,
it couldn't, by definition, affect anything else.

 > The best "all in one" runtime I have found for me is the
 > gladewin32.sf.net as it keeps it's DLL's OUT of the window's dir

This is a red herring. Surely only an extremely misguided installer
these days would install stuff into the Windows (or System32) folder.

 >  (everything goes into C:\GTK)

Hopefully it doesn't hardcode a silly path like that?

 > It also includes bits that other GTK+ libs DO NOT have, like
 > gtkglext (openGL extension), glade/libglade, libxml2, cairo, etc.

Both the current (2.10) and previous (2.8) major versions of GTK+
*require* cairo, so if some GTK+ installer that claims to be
all-inclusive does not include cairo, it has to be prtty old, or not
all-inclusive after all.

Why should a *GTK+* installer include gtkglext, libglade and libxml2?
Those are not part of GTK+. OK, so maybe some specific apps uses them
in addition to, or on top of, GTK+. But then it's wrong to call it a
GTK+ installer, it is more an installer for the inclusive set of
dependencies of *that* application.

As a rhetoric question, why then just these additional libs? Some
other app might also need whatever other libraries from the GNOME
stack, like libart_lgpl, libIDL, ORBit2, gtkhtml, whatever.

--tml