Hi Philip,
I'll defer to others (Robert) for the decision, but I don't agree with
your point of view. I think the redist is as close to a set of system
DLLs as it can be without being on the actual Windows installation CD,
so I think there's no point in putting copies of it everywhere on your
system.
Personally I would trade the whopping 1.6 MB this would take up for the assurance that the binaries will work on all machines.
1.6MB per project, per instance of the binaries, per... That's the
point, they're meant to be system-wide, not all over the system.
Of course if you want an end-user's first experience running osgviewer to view some model they found online to be a cryptic error message, then by all means leave things the way they are.
OSG is not an end-user app. It's a library which you'll use to develop
other apps. If you downloaded the binary packages, it's either because
you wanted to evaluate it for possible use in your project, or you want
to use it in an existing project (perhaps in place of a previous version).
Unfortunately, not every first time user of OSG is going to have MSVC installed or the runtime libraries installed.
A note in the readme should suffice. We can even have a special readme
that we only include in the Windows binary packages. As I said, if they
want to do almost anything else on the machine they'll need the redist,
so whether OSG is the reason they install it or anything else makes
little difference. In all likelyhood they'll have Visual Studio
installed anyways... So I think we're arguing about a minority of users.
What we might consider doing would be, instead of generating tarballs,
for Windows we could generate an .msi installer that would install the
runtime correctly if needed (like most apps do). We could even generate
both, and make it clear that if you download the tarball you need the
runtime installed already.
There is no disadvantage to including the runtime DLLs aside from an extra 4
files and 1.6MB of space used. I think this is really a no brainer.
There is no disadvantage to not including the runtime DLLs. Period. And
we don't pollute the system with copies of DLLs that will be installed
to the system directories by some other app sooner or later.
Honestly, if there was a way for me to have one version of libpng,
libjpeg, etc. like on a Linux box, installed system-wide, I'd do that.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that on Windows. But at least we can
keep the dependencies we need to ship to a minimum.
J-S
--
______________________________________________________
Jean-Sebastien Guay jean-sebastien.g...@cm-labs.com
http://www.cm-labs.com/
http://whitestar02.webhop.org/
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