Re: Confirm Installed Run-Time Version

[jcupitt gmail com]

Hi again,

On 19 July 2011 13:04, richard boaz <ivor boaz gmail com> wrote:
> i have to do this for MAC platforms as well, (where installing gtk+ is a
> right-old PITA), so i will use solution 2 and simply provide all the
> necessary gtk+ libraries as part of the app install itself.

I use gtk-osx for this, it's pretty nice. I have an OS X build system
based on jhbuild here:

https://github.com/jcupitt/build-osx

it downloads and builds everything, then makes a myprog.app for you,
then puts it in a .dmg.

> use a program (listing below) to confirm that the installed version conforms
> to minimum requirements, outputing:

I honestly think this will cause you terrible pain. The various linux
distributions vary widely in how they set the components up and the
versions they are on. And you have little guarantee of binary
compatibility :-( Your program will crash mysteriously in
hard-to-debug ways, people will blame you and it'll hurt the
reputation of your code.

The reasonable options on Linux are:

- only supply a tarball and expect users to build it ... linux makes
this easy, it's very safe, and Debian/Redhat/etc. users will
energetically package your program for you, saving you months of
annoying work

- supply a binary that includes all libraries except libc, see firefox
for tips on this, they've spent a huge amount of time on this issue

Note that even after investing several developer-years of time, the
firefox binaries on linux STILL fail on some distributions. Linux is
just not geared up for binary distribution.

There are also these projects which aim to address this knotty problem:

http://listaller.nlinux.org/
http://zero-install.sourceforge.net/
http://portablelinuxapps.org/
http://icculus.org/mojosetup/

One of these might also be worth looking at.

John