Hi again, On 19 July 2011 13:04, richard boaz <ivor.boaz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > i have to do this for MAC platforms as well, (where installing gtk+ is a > right-old PITA), so i will use solution 2 and simply provide all the > necessary gtk+ libraries as part of the app install itself. I use gtk-osx for this, it's pretty nice. I have an OS X build system based on jhbuild here: https://github.com/jcupitt/build-osx it downloads and builds everything, then makes a myprog.app for you, then puts it in a .dmg. > use a program (listing below) to confirm that the installed version conforms > to minimum requirements, outputing: I honestly think this will cause you terrible pain. The various linux distributions vary widely in how they set the components up and the versions they are on. And you have little guarantee of binary compatibility :-( Your program will crash mysteriously in hard-to-debug ways, people will blame you and it'll hurt the reputation of your code. The reasonable options on Linux are: - only supply a tarball and expect users to build it ... linux makes this easy, it's very safe, and Debian/Redhat/etc. users will energetically package your program for you, saving you months of annoying work - supply a binary that includes all libraries except libc, see firefox for tips on this, they've spent a huge amount of time on this issue Note that even after investing several developer-years of time, the firefox binaries on linux STILL fail on some distributions. Linux is just not geared up for binary distribution. There are also these projects which aim to address this knotty problem: http://listaller.nlinux.org/ http://zero-install.sourceforge.net/ http://portablelinuxapps.org/ http://icculus.org/mojosetup/ One of these might also be worth looking at. John _______________________________________________ gtk-list mailing list gtk-list@xxxxxxxxx http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-list
