Re: Distributing gnustep-based software

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 4 Feb 2005, at 20:14, Alex Perez wrote:
> Under Windows, at least, this could be theoretically possible. Wasn't 
> there a patch to GNustep under win32 to make it use the timezone info 
> in the windows registry by default? I seem to remember this...as for 
> the character stuff, is this even really necessary under windows?

Yes ... the character set data specifies what is in the standard 
NSCharacterSets

>  With Windows, if you had all your DLLs and other libraries in one 
> directory (not necessarily one EXE file, but just all of it in one 
> directory) it and have built the application using mingw, the binary 
> is native and as all native windows apps do, it should look in the 
> current directory *FIRST* for DLLs.
>
> Richard, your thoughts? Is this possible? I think it surely is. 
> Honestly, I think we need to be able to get gnustep-base to this 
> point, where it's basically just a set of DLLs under Win32 that people 
> can distribute with their app. This seems completely possible, but 
> since most of the GNUstep developers don't use windows much, the 
> tendency to just say "nope, can't be done, end of story, goodbye" 
> seems recur over and over in an infinite loop.

Well, you need to distribute a few resource files as well as dlls, just 
like under unix.
The gnustep code won't look for resources in the current directory 
(seems a bit insecure
as a standard behavior) ... but it's trivial to haver a script set the 
environment variables up
so it knows where to get resources.

As I said, I see no problem distributing stuff in a package with an 
application ... I have done it as a solaris package and see no reason 
why it shouldn't work for windows too.