Glom packaging on Windows

Sunday, January 27. 2008

With added support for self-hosting, Glom for Windows now supports all the major features that the Linux version does (apart from Service Publishing, which is probably way more effort since Avahi is not available on Windows). It's time to think about how to package it, and what dependencies to include, especially whether to ship with GTK+ or not.

All the major GTK+-using projects such as Inkscape, Pidgin and Wireshark include GTK+. Even the GIMP does so since version 2.4. This actually generates a lot of duplication, which is why we (or, rather, I) did decide not to ship it with Gobby. Of course we are getting complaints such as "Hey, this doesn't work because libgtk-win32-2-0-0.dll was not found!!1" from time to time, but if people are not able to read the instructions right above the download link, well, then I'm sorry. Do others think the added duplication is worth that the user needs to install GTK+ manually once? Or, maybe, is this just because there is no "official" GTK+ installer?

Then, there is python, and I have not so much experience here. Glom links statically against libpython, so it should even run without python being installed. However, buttons and calculated fields won't work then, unless we ship with at least pyGTK. Perhaps the best thing is to state that for button scripts and calculated fields to work, python and pyGTK have to be installed. We just have to make sure that Python finds the glom and pygda modules then, even if Python was installed after Glom (so it had no chance to install them into the standard location for such modules), but probably Python has some API for this.

Last but not least, we have gtkmm which also has an installer that is hosted on ftp.gnome.org even. I think we should either ship both GTK+ and gtkmm, or none of them.

If you have any thoughts on this, recommendations and suggestions are welcome.

Posted by Armin Burgmeier in Openismus at 01:41 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (2)

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Glom Windows Installer
Here it is, Glom's installer for Windows. Thanks to the opinions to my last blog entry. I set up an all-in-one installer, so Glom should run out of the box after installing (please tell me if not). It includes GTK+ from SVN with my patch from bug #506062

Weblog: Armin's personal Blog
Tracked: Feb 04, 21:59

Glom Windows Installer
Here it is, Glom's installer for Windows. Thanks to the opinions on my last blog entry. I set up an all-in-one installer, so Glom should run out of the box after installing (please tell me if not). It includes GTK+ from SVN with my patch from bug #506062

Weblog: Armin's personal Blog
Tracked: Feb 04, 22:01

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I think this might be a broken concept, but it is really wiser to duplicate the gtk lib for the moment.

The application distribution will be bigger but okay for harddisk space and the internet connection speed we get today.

The most important is having a common concept to install an application on a platform and on Windows it is simple: there is no dependency at all... All the regular MFC applications do the same... Now if you ask all the potential users to change their behavior, they'll simply say your application does not work and sucks (users tend to so react like this :p)

#1 Stiph on 2008-01-27 09:14 (Reply)

1. Include the library/dep installer in the download
2. Only install them if they are not there yet (or are older than required).

Windows has mechanisms for this kind of stuff, a windows program depends on dlls too. It just happens behind the scenes.

#2 t on 2008-01-27 13:22 (Reply)

Duplicate GTK. This is the most fool proof option available and as you have already mentioned there are problems likely to face non-fools too.
Brave users can - as we advised them with Inkscape - delete the extra copy of GTK and it will fall back to using the system version.

Inkscape did also provide UPX compressed copies of the EXE file and for minor upgrades, day-to-day testing, and what-not, this allowed users to upgrade with a smaller download. Inkscape though is very clear that is most interested in attracting contributors, developers, testers, et cetera.

If someone decides to package your application for PortableApps.com then it might be worth reconsidering things and stipping your package down as much as possible but for most users the inconvenience of a separate GTK hurts far more than the few people with limited disk space it helps.

Frankly bundling is the way to go.

#3 Alan Horkan (Homepage) on 2008-01-27 20:00 (Reply)

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