Re: comments on the gtkmm -vcXX- naming convention

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Wed, 2008-10-15 at 20:05 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-10-15 at 13:33 -0400, Philip Kovacs wrote:
> > I installed the latest gtkmm Windows development package and I have
> > some comments.
> > 
> > From the point of view of application developers who require gtkmm as
> > a dependency,
> > this new -vcXX- naming convention for the import libraries is a
> > burden.
> 
> Do you mean a burden in general, or a burden for people who used it with
> the old names?

Also, if the DLLs for different compilers all had the same name, then
confusion would be easy when some people copied them into common
locations, such as Windows/System32. Experience shows that people get
confused easily - someone would do it and then the crashes would be very
hard to debug.

> > I have to rework my build systems to handle this new library naming
> > convention; offer 
> > end-users a switch to select VC80/90 and then link to the correct
> > libraries after "assembling" 
> > a library name based on the switch.
> > 
> > A better approach would have been to use the standard names we are
> > accustomed to:
> > cairomm-1_0.lib, sigc-2_0.lib, gtkmm-2_4.lib, etc. and creating
> > separate installers targeting
> > the required runtime.  The root of the installation tree would be the
> > ONLY place where the
> > runtime was indicated, e.g.:
> > 
> > C:\Program Files\Gtkmm-2.14.1-VC80
> > 
> > or
> > 
> > C:\Program Files\Gtkmm-2.14.1-VC90 
> > 
> > That way, you can easily point into the needed tree to link instead of
> > having to rework
> > build systems.
> > 
> > Also, I haven't built gtkmm from source since this changeover.  What
> > naming convention
> > do you use for the import libraries when building with MSVC?  Do you
> > discover the runtime
> > version automatically and name appropriately?
> > 
> > Really would have preferred to see my approach above....
> 
> 
-- 
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