Re: Gtkmm Windows Runtime Installer - Silent Option

[Armin Burgmeier <armin arbur net>]

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?)

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

The DLLs in the runtime installer are stripped (the MinGW ones,
actually). This means they are smaller because they don't contain debug
symbols.

I thought of providing both debug and non-debug versions of the MinGW
DLL's with the installer (as for MSVC++), but this would require
different import libraries as well, and many applications using MinGW
are built using autotools. As the library to use is more or less
hardcoded that way (via the pkg-config file), this is probably not as
useful as for the MinGW ones.

Maybe it's worth thinking about adding a separate redist/ directory to
the development installer that contains stripped versions of the DLLs in
bin/. Then we could tell people to use these DLLs for redistributing.

> 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?

We actually tried this with Gobby[1] on Windows. We didn't ship GTK+
(and gtkmm) with it for a long time but pointed people to runtime
installers, so that DLLs can be shared. But there were so many people
that had problems to get it running so that we decided to redistribute
GTK+.

However, if we keep the runtime installers, then developers still have
the option to (optionally) ship their applications without gtkmm. It is
still possible to offer a version without the GTK+ and gtkmm runtime for
more technical users that do like such things to be shared (FWIW, I'm
one of them). From a maintainence point of view, the additional work for
the separate runtime installer is nearly nonexistant.

> 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.
> 
> - John Hobbs

Armin

 [1] http://gobby.0x539.de