DLL hell - Glade killed my applications

"clivel_bundu <[email protected]>" <[email protected]> writes:
 > This leads me to the next suggestion, is it possible to have the
 > DLL name, match the file version.

Definitely not. At least not the GLib and GTK+ DLLs I build, anybody
is of course free to build their own DLLs using whatever naming scheme
they want. The DLL name is supposed to stay the same as long as each
version is binary compatible with the previous. New functions can be
introduced, but the API (and ABI) of all old functions stays the same.

 > i.e libgtk-win32-2.0-0.dll if I look at the properties, the file
 > version is 2.2.0.2.  The libgtk-win32-2.0-0.dll installed with
 > Glade is file version 2.0.6.14. Obviously this can cause problems.

Only if some very badly behaving installer installs an old version on
top of a newer one, and some application did depend on new
functionality or bug fixes in the newer version.

 > If one distributes an application linked with one version of a DLL,
 > it will break, if someone installs an application linked with a
 > different version.

No it won't, unless you have a badly written installer, as I said
above.

 > There seems to be numberous GTK runtime installers floating around,
 > is it possible to have one "official" installer, which can be
 > downloaded or linked from www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/?

Nope. The closest you will get to "official" from me is the zipfiles,
I don't want to tinker with installers.

 > I also do not think that it is a good idea for the dll's to be
 > installed to the Windows\system32 directory, 

Definitely not, that's very disturbing behaviour. Yes, it might have
been common many years ago, but shouldn't happen any more.

--tml