Re: Symlinks from Tools to Applications

[Nicola Pero]

> On Windows for example, I think that we should create a simple loader 
> application that sets up the environment to locate the various framework 
> and tool paths to locate relevant DLL's using registry settings for the 
> GNUstep location, and then spawn the application. Much like a binary or 
> script form of openapp. We could then create shortcuts to these and put 
> them in the start menu. An alternative approach is a full-blown Explorer 
> shell addin (caution needed as it requires COM and a MS compiler).

I've been working on Windows in the past weeks ... and we're now far more 
advanced 
than that ... ie once you have all your stuff compiled inside MinGW, you can 
take it 
out of MinGW and use it directly as Windows native binaries (see the end of the 
new README.MinGW).

In particular, I just double-click on the .exe and it works. :-)

And we use no registry, which is great as there are no conflicts if you have 
multiple
installations.

So, we don't need any shell scripts or wrappers or anything.

Thanks

PS: We still need lots of thoughts on how to best package things for end-users 
... 
eg, I'd personally like to have a 'binary/end-user' GNUstep installer that 
installs
gnustep-base.dll, gnustep-gui.dll, etc in the standard Windows DLL locations ...
(and no MinGW and no development environment) so that if I want to distribute 
binaries of Gomoku.app for Windows (for example) I just need to compile it 
under 
MinGW and then I can just distribute the resulting Gomoku.app binary folder as 
a .zip file, without having to include all the gnustep libraries that will be 
provided by the GNUstep installer. (and still, people would be able to start 
Gomoku.app by just double-clicking on Gomoku.exe).