Re: Gtkmm Windows Runtime Installer - Silent Option

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Mon, 2008-10-13 at 04:39 -1000, John Hobbs wrote:
> Clearly I must not understand what's going on, perhaps you can clear
> this up for me.
> 
> Say I have 10 different favorite Gtkmm apps that I really want to
> install on my Windows machine, because they are great pieces of
> software.  So I go download all 10 of them and install them, and each
> one follows your recommendation of putting the libs next to the app.
> So then I have 10 copies of the libs, and when I start up the apps I
> get 10 copies of them in memory? (The question mark is because I don't
> know if that is true with how dll's work, do they check memory even
> when the loaded lib is from a different location on disk?)

Yes, I think this is fairly common on Windows. Even MS doesn't seem to
have a good-enough record of ABI stability for all their DLLs, plus
installers are rarely well-behaved, so they can easily overwrite each
other's DLLs if they are shared. Opinions differ.

Linux has better package management though that's then more complex for
the user.

This seems even more important for C++ considering the various
incompatible compilers and compiler options, with just the DLL name to
give you (and your installer) a clue about what it really is.

I could be wrong about this. This is just what I think the consensus is,
even for GTK+ itself, and I want to keep thing simple and reliable.

> So why provide a run-time installer at all then?

Yeah, good point. Maybe we shouldn't.

Let's see what comes out of this discussion.

>   I mean, unless you
> intend for developers to say "The gtkmm runtime is a pre-req" and have
> them go download it, or provide that utility in their installer, then
> why provide it at all?  Shouldn't a developer version that they can
> take the libs from and distribute themselves be enough in that case?
> 
> I'm trusting that you have good reasons, you are clearly a dedicated
> developer and knowledgeable person, but I just can't understand it
> yet.

-- 
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