Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: bundled libs

[Markus Schiltknecht]

Hi,

Stephen Leake wrote:
> The only thing close to native package management on Windows is the
> Microsoft Windows Update service. It pushes security changes, and will
> also push other changes if you let it. That is the _only_ user option.
> It's designed for people like my mother-in-law, who barely understand
> what a mouse does :).

Well, doesn't look like we'd have a chance of getting monotone 
distributed that way... :-(

> But such people will be using mtn win32 binary installation, if they
> use mtn at all. Developers should not mind some manual packaging, as
> long as the instructions are clear, and it doesn't change very often.

Yeah, bundling the binary with necessary DLLs would be easy enough. It's 
rather the developers, wanting to build from source, who would probably 
also need to compile the dependencies. OTOH, we could simply tell them 
where to fetch the DLLs from.

> Windows will keep DLLs separate if they are in separate directories.
> So putting the DLLs for mtn in the same directory as mtn.exe should be
> enough.

Sure, but that drives the concept of shared libraries ad absurbum. It's 
probably safer and simpler to provide a single static binary, in that case.

> If we have sufficient resources (ie buildbots and developer time), it
> is certainly the best for the widest set of users to have both known
> good bundled packages, _and_ the ability to use the equivalent system
> lib as well.
>
> If we run out of testing/maintaining resources, I think dropping the
> bundled libs (perhaps on a subset of the supported systems?) is better
> than dropping the system libs, as long as there is a way to get the
> needed libraries on all platforms.

Well, it's not like we already had support for system libraries... And 
after all this discussion, I think it's simplest to maintain both 
variants and use whichever is appropriate for the target OS.

As Zack already proposed, we should probably strive for including the 
external library as is - including calling the original configuration 
script it provides. So as to minimize the work needed to upgrade as well 
as being as close to the system libraries in the wild.

> I'm not clear if this last paragraph is talking about bundling DLLs or
> source.

If we use the system libraries, we don't need the library's source, but 
need to provide a DLL (or tell people where to get those) for windows. 
So these two things are very related, IMO.

> The current Windows mtn binary installer does bundle DLLs.

I didn't know. What DLLs does it need?

Regards

Markus