Hi, Many cross-platorm libraries provide a Windows installer for developers of that platform, provided by either external parties or as part of the project. It's really convenient for developers on Windows, because there isn't very much package manager support, and usually you end up linking to these binaries globally in your Visual Studios project anyways. These installers usually include documentation, headers, prebuilt static and dynamic libraries, debugging symbols, and sometimes the option to install source code. Some examples of libraries that offer this off the top of my head are OpenSSL, SlimDX, and GLFW, although I am sure there are countless others.
I think that libuv is a good candidate to provide an installer like this. Firstly, it adds some appeal to Windows developers, being able to quickly install and link their projects to libuv. Secondly, for developers who build and distribute libraries on top of libuv for use on Windows, it's a lot easier to tell one of your users to simply install the libuv development packages than it is to guide them through the process of building and installing libuv. Personally, I'm interested in the second use case. There's a lot of initial questions that arise about how libuv should approach this issue. Should it be internal to the project or should we rely on an external source to provide these packages? Should it be a full-fledged installer like OpenSSL, or should we just provide a zip archive? What should be included in these packages, and how often should they be released? Many projects choose to distribute nightly builds. There definitely needs to be a discussion on all these details. What do you think? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "libuv" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/libuv. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
