Wireshark · Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] EXTERNAL: Windows Installer for Gtk+3.6.2 and gtkmm-3.6.0

[Paul Davis <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 at 1:44 PM, Bálint Réczey <balint@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi Paul,

2013/2/17 Paul Davis <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

>
>
> On Sat, Feb 16, 2013 at 7:27 AM, Bálint Réczey <balint@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Unfortunately our efforts are severely impacted by the lack of official
>> GTK+
>> installers for Windows and OS X and this uncertainty was a major reason
>> which
>> brought the Qt port alive.
>
>
> I'm not speaking as a representative of the GTK project, but I will note
> that as the lead developer of a large scale app that uses GTK to provide
> portability to Linux, OS X and Windows, it is my judgement that you should
> plan to bundle GTK within your application and not rely on it being

On GNU/Linux distributions we rely on the package manager to provide the
GTK libraries and it works perfectly.

There is no package manager on OS X that could do this. MacPorts or Fink would be the only equivalent, in which case you would need to talk to them about their plans for GTK3. However, you will likely find that if you ever need to do development on an OS X system, the presence of packages from either MacPorts or Fink can make life very, very complex unless it just so happens that they have the precise versions that you need. 

> understanding of things, but on OS X it simply makes a lot more sense to
> cook up a .app bundle with everything your application needs, including GTK
> and really seems to reflects Apple's intentions for 3rd party apps that rely
> on additional 3rd party libraries.

Wireshark already provide such bundles at https://wireshark.org/download.html
thus the problem is only not having the GTK3 binaries we could put in
the bundles.

so build it yourself ... what is the problem?

moreover, the nature of GTK is such that you cannot "just" include the binaries in the bundle and expect stuff to work. GTK (2 and 3) are not currently "relocatable" except on Windows.