Re: Distributing gnustep-based software

[Alex Perez]

Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
> On 4 Feb 2005, at 16:14, Sébastien Pierre wrote:
>
> > Hi everyone !
> >
> > I was wondering if it is possible to statically link everything that a 
> > program uses in GNUstep, so that I can end up with an executable that 
> > will "simply work out of the box" on Linux systems with or without 
> > GNUstep.
>
>
> No ... the system uses some data files (character sets and time zones at 
> least) ... so you have to distribute them and put them in the correct 
> directory hierarchy even if you were able to statically link.  Simplest 
> just to distribute all the shared libraries as part of your package.
> You can certainly distribute a full GNUstep setup as part of a package 
> though.

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? 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.

Cheers,
Alex