Re: of the difficulty of running gtk-perl applications on windows

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On Mon, 2008-04-28 at 11:34 +1000, Adam Kennedy wrote:
> Well, maybe not in Strawberry itself... certainly in Chocolate (the
> upcoming "richer and heavier" equivalent of strawberry.
>
> I'd certainly like to see some easy automated way to install GTK on
> Win32 though... even a PAR dist would probably be ok.

gtk+ on win32 is as hard to install as exploding a zip file into the
application's directory:

  http://www.gtk.org/download-windows.html

so deploying is effectively shipping those zip files with your
application - this is to answer the question below:

> >  Someone else:
> >  I'm a little confused as to why gtk+ support in Windows is so bad. It isn't a
> >  bad API, but it is effectively undeployable (in a commercially viable sense)
> >  on Windows.

there is an ongoing effort about making it possible to provide a way to
automate the bundling using one of the umptenth graphical installers,
but as long as you use the files provided by gtk.org you should be safe
to use whatever you like.

is this hard? no.

could it be easier? definitely yes.

patches welcome? you betcha.

in short: install the bundle in the application's directory and mangle
PATH accordingly. you'll be "safe" in the sense that you will target a
specific revision of gtk+ and no other application will mess up your
own. this is how pidgin and gimp do and it worked out pretty well.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
Emmanuele Bassi,
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.net
B: http://log.emmanuelebassi.net