potentially serious problem (was Re: WinPT on Windows NT problem)

[Richard Laager]

On Sat, 2005-04-09 at 22:41 -0700, Erpo wrote:
> It's not ok to list SHELL32.dll v4.32 or later as a requirement for
> running a program. This does not mean it's not ok to _have_ SHELL32.dll
> v4.32 or later as a requirement for running a program. The difference?

While I totally agree with your points, I'd like to offer just one
thought: If your operating environment provides a proper package
manager, you can have dependencies like shell32 >= 4.32. When you tried
to install WinPT, the package manager should tell you that you don't
have the right version of shell32.dll, which is provided by the package
"Internet Explorer". This makes it pretty clear what you need to do.

The Microsoft approach involves having applications ship copies of DLLs
that they didn't make. This is VERY BAD. It leads to DLL Hell. It also
makes system maintenance a nightmare because you have multiple copies of
the same DLL all over the machine. Finally, it totally defeats the point
of DLLs because you end up loading multiple copies into memory.

> At one point
> I found a combination of a gtk installer, a Gaim installer, and a Gimp
> installer that wouldn't destroy eachother.

I've never had trouble making this work. The best way to do it is to use
GTK+ as distributed by Gaim, I think.

Richard Laager

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