Re: GTK+ on windows

[Ted Bullock <tbullock comlore com>]

A couple points

Dov:

A lot of what you are talking about relates to distribution rather
than build.  Applications can distribute gtk however they want, I am
talking about how one goes about building their application.

The problem with the build system is that it is really hard to use it
from windows.  There are tons of windows developers out there who
might want to make GTK applications and maybe they don't because
setting up a build environment is a massive wall.  Linking to the
package provided by Tor would be fine except it uses a different c
runtime and thus doesn't work.

One shouldn't have to configure the universe and learn entirely new
build systems to use GTK

David:

Yes, you pretty much captured my reasoning.

John:

I am talking about removing the struggle for developers using msvc (or
the intel compile for that matter), while it's cool that you have a
system that works for you I would be willing to bet it took a long
time to get set up correctly.

As to scriptability, the msbuild stuff (available for c projects from
msvc 10 onwards) is pretty slick.

And yes I can relate to why someone would statically link the whole of
gtk into their application.

To sum up.

To be honest I am not a windows person either, I just write write
software for the oil and gas industry and about 0% of them use linux,
bsd or anything like it.  I want to be able to squeeze open source
software into that environment.

So how this is going to work is similar to how openbsd works with
xenocara. Pick and choose the components which work together, send
patches upstream to those that don't.  Common global include directory
for public dependancy headers.  Each dependancy with its own msbuild
project.

By the way, here is the kb article regarding the c runtime redistribution:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/326922

I am putting together a little spec explain how it will work in detail
which should be available soon enough.

Anyways, I want to re-iterate that I am scratching my own itch, if you
find that you aren't itchy in the same way as me that's cool.