Re: Packaing and deployment of a gtkmm/cygwin app

[Cedric Gustin <cedric gustin swing be>]

Vladislav Grinchenko wrote:
> I ported one of my gtkmm apps to cygwin with gtkmm. My goal is to
> assemble an installer or a zip archive for the end user to be able to
> install and run the app on his/her machine.
> 
> The app uses POSIX functions and has to be built with cygwin dll (thus I
> cannot use http://www.pcpm.ucl.ac.be/~gustin/win32_ports)

Neither can you use the GTK+ binaries from gladewin32 (or from Tor
Lilqvist official site) as they are native ports (built against the
MSVCRT runtime)


> According to Robert's <morelli cs utah edu> posting on 10 Mar 2004, my
> case is what he categorized as #1 scenario:
> 
> "1.  The cygwin development environment which resembles a unix 
> environment in which you compile code containing POSIX calls and which
> produces executables depending on cywin.dll for POSIX emulation."
> 
> The way I built it is this:
> 
> - I ran cygwin installer and in sntalled the minimum configuration plus
> development packages for gcc, gtk+, and autotools.
> 
> - Then I re-ran cygwin installer adding
> http://cygwin-ports.sf.net/install target to the list and picked up all
> of the gtkmm packages.

You also want GTK+ for cygwin.

> 1. It seems that resultant foobar.exe won't run without having X server
> up and running. Yet it seems that demo apps from GTK+ runtime env don't
> have this requirement and doesn't come with X server bundled. Am I
> missing a compiler flag or something? Many posts to this list assume
> '-mno-cygwin'. I cannot make such an assumption 'cause I need POSIX
> functinality.

GTK+ from gladewin32 runs natively on win32. On cygwin, GTK+ is known to
work OK when built for the X11 backend. I don't know what's the status
of the cygwin port of the win32 backend.

> 2. Given that #1 is resolved, how would I package my binaries?

> Here's what I have already tried:
> 
> - I downloaded Gtk+/Win32 Runtime Environment Installer from
> gladewin32.sf.net and installed it to c:\GTK

Do NOT use the gladewin32 binaries if you build your application with
the cygwin runtime.

> Scanning throught the mailing list archives, I came upon these
> suggestions:
> 
>>From Cedric Gustin posting on Sun, 4 Jan 2004,
> 
> "Your gtkmm application will require both the gtkmm and GTK+ runtimes.
> For gtkmm, this is basically the glibmm, pangomm, atkmm, gdkmm and gtkmm
> DLLs."
> 
> I'm new to win32/cygwin world, and any suggestions/pointers to the
> actial apps would be highly appreciated.

What are the posix functions required by your application ? On win32, I
strongly recommend the native, MSVCRT, mingw32-based approach instead of
the cygwin one. Alternatives or drop-in replacements usually exist on
win32 for posix functions (like http://sourceware.org/pthreads-win32/
for example).

Cedric