Packaging an application on Windows

[Bruce Sherwood <Bruce_Sherwood ncsu edu>]

Thanks to the helpful advice various people on this list gave me, I 
managed to package a gtkmm application on Windows. I started with MinGW 
and Msys already installed, then used the easy-to-use binary installers 
of gtk and gtkmm.

In addition to mingw10.dll and a couple of Boost dll's, I included the 
files listed below in the same directory as the main application (a .pyd 
file for a 3D visualization module for Python, written in C++; see 
vpython.org). I stripped the files to save a lot of space. The 
installer, made with InnoSetup, is 8.5 MB (the non-gtkmm version was 2.5 
MB).

I determined which dll's I needed by repeatedly running the application 
and one-by-one getting error messages saying I was missing a dll. And 
then to make sure I'd gotten everything, I changed the name of c:\MinGW 
to c:\xxxMinGW and ran again, to prevent accessing dll's from the 
developer directories.

The only Windows-specific code remaining is a substitute for 
gettimeofday. I see in surfing the web that lots of people keep 
reinventing this routine for use on Windows. Seems like it would make 
sense for it to be part of gtk for Windows.

A colleague is attempting to use the new gtkmm-to-Quartz machinery on 
the Mac to make a native Mac version of VPython with a simple 
installation procedure, because many of our end users find it a 
difficult hassle installing X11 and Xcode and fink and finally VPython. 
Hopefully we'll have essentially one set of C++ code that works on all 
platforms.

I should comment that I haven't yet released the new version 
("4beta20"); I'm still doing testing.

Thanks much to those of you who have contributed to creating the gtkmm 
environment!

Bruce Sherwood

------------------------------

MinGW/etc/fonts
MinGW/etc/gtk-2.0
MinGW/etc/pango
MinGW/lib/gtk-2.0
MinGW/lib/pango

iconv.dll
intl.dll
libatk-1.0-0.dll
libatkmm-1.6-1.dll
libcairo-2.dll
libcairomm-1.0-1.dll
libfontconfig-1.dll
libfreetype-6.dll
libgdk-win32-2.0-0.dll
libgdk_pixbuf-2.0-0.dll
libgdkglext-win32-1.0-0.dll
libgdkmm-2.4-1.dll
libglade-2.0-0.dll
libglademm-2.4-1.dll
libglib-2.0-0.dll
libglibmm-2.4-1.dll
libgmodule-2.0-0.dll
libgobject-2.0-0.dll
libgthread-2.0-0.dll
libgtk-win32-2.0-0.dll
libgtkglext-win32-1.0-0.dll
libgtkmm-2.4-1.dll
libpango-1.0-0.dll
libpangocairo-1.0-0.dll
libpangoft2-1.0-0.dll
libpangomm-1.4-1.dll
libpangowin32-1.0-0.dll
libpng12.dll
libsigc-2.0-0.dll
libxml2.dll
zlib1.dll