Re: gtkmm on Windows: Last steps

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Sun, 2008-10-19 at 16:36 +0200, Armin Burgmeier wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-10-19 at 15:40 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote:
> > It looks like we are almost done with the gtkmm on Windows effort. I
> > have just a couple of questions:
> > 
> > 1.
> > http://live.gnome.org/gtkmm/MSWindows
> > says
> > "make sure the "Add the gtkmm runtime directory to the PATH variable"
> > option is checked. This is required for Windows to find the gtkmm DLL
> > files."
> > But:
> > 
> > 1.1
> > If you should make sure that it is checked, why is it an option? The
> > page should tell us how to make the decision.
> 
> Isn't the following clear enough?
> 
> "If you know what you do, then you can also uncheck that option. This
> can be useful if you have multiple versions of gtkmm installed (for
> example, both runtime and development DLLs) and want to choose which one
> to use by setting the PATH variable manually."

Not really, no. See below.

> Yes, it's actually an option for advanced users. That's why it's checked
> by default and the wiki page says only to change it if one knows what
> she does.
> 
> It also makes sure users notice that we change the PATH variable. This
> can help them when testing redistribution packages (it doesn't make
> sense to test whether an application runs out of the box if all the
> required DLLs are in the PATH anyway).
> 
> People could also want to only set the PATH in msys so it does not
> affect the global system, but only the msys environment.
> 
> So personally, I see enough use cases to justify to keep this option. If
> others feel different about it, please tell us.
> 
> > 1.2
> > I thought that applications would find the DLLs because they are in the
> > same directory. Why is something in the PATH environment variable also
> > needed? I don't understand why MS Visual Studio would need it either if
> > we are using these "property pages".
> 
> MSVC++ does not need it to build stuff, but to run or debug from within
> the IDE. I'm not sure whether there is an option in MSVC++ to extend the
> DLL search path that the property pages could set, but I'll check.

That sounds rather strange. Please do check. It would be nice to remove
the PATH change if possible.

If not, we need to mention that reason (for debugging) on the wiki page.

> If people do redistribute gtkmm with their applications, then it is not
> necessary to set the PATH variable. However, the main purpose of the
> runtime installer is to allow running applications that do not
> redistribute gtkmm.
> 
> It might be debatable whether we would like to support that or not. An
> option would be only to provide a development installer and tell people
> to strip the MinGW binaries before redistributing. But that's also a bit
> dangerous since stripping some libraries such as libxml2.dll breaks
> them. Maybe this is because they have been built with MSVC, but I'm not
> sure. So it's not as easy as "strip *.dll". We would need to make clear
> which libraries to strip and which not.
> 
> > 2.
> > The wiki page should make it clear that the runtime-only installer
> > installs stripped (no debug symbols) for mingw, but that the non-debug
> > DLLs are the same for other compilers, because it is harder for build
> > systems to automatically choose between stripped and debug versions on
> > that platform.
> 
> I clarified this on the Wiki.
> 
> > We should make it clear that it's probably the stripped
> > DLLs that you want to redistribute with your application.
> 
> That's already mentioned in the Redistributing section. "If your
> application is built with MinGW, you should use the files from the
> runtime package, since they don't contain debug symbols."
> 
> > 3.
> > Have we yet found a use for the silent install? If not, why do we
> > mention it?
> 
> People have asked for it on the mailing list, so I added it to the Wiki
> page. I do think it's good in general that this is documented somewhere
> since there are few other options to find out the available flags. I'm
> not sure whether people are actually using silent install or not, but
> maybe others can comment on that.

At the least we need to make it clear that we don't recommend using this
from application installers.

> > 4.
> > Would someone like to update this section in the gtkmm book (in the
> > gtkmm-documentation module in svn), and just refer to the live.gnome.org
> > page where appropriate, instead of repeating:
> > http://www.gtkmm.org/docs/gtkmm-2.4/docs/tutorial/html/sec-windows-installation.html
> > Otherwise we'll have to remove it.
> 
> I'll have a look.

Thanks.

-- 
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