Re: GnuTLS for W32

[Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org>]

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On 1/4/12 10:41 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> From: Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es>
>> Date: Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:00:57 +0100
>>
>> it reported itself as one of the "good" dlls. Then I started to put my
>> runtime dlls on the same directory as the rest of my binaries, and the
>> problems of those users disappeared. Most of them haven't that storage
>> device. The issue costed me a several hundred work hours, mostly trying
>> to desperately find bugs inside my application.
> 
> Conclusions based on experiences from Windows 2000 should be tossed as
> irrelevant nowadays.  Citing this is a good "war story", but has no
> bearing on design decisions for future features.

It underscores a general principle: ship applications as
self-contained units that don't try to muck with the rest of the
system. The only reason doing otherwise remotely feasible on Unixish
systems it the presence of package managers. On systems without
centralized package management, like Windows and OS X, shipping
self-contained packages is the only sane thing to do.

Microsoft even added COM features ("registration-free COM") to make
this approach easier.

With disks being as large as they are now, it makes no sense to try to
optimize for some resource sharing when you can just stick DLLs
alongside other downloaded files in perfect safety.

> In addition, latest GnuTLS cannot be compiled with MinGW in a way that
> will run on anything older than XP anyway.  (Maybe some non-trivial
> tweaking could overcome that, but I didn't bother, and if Nikos built
> the stock distribution, which is what I glean from his script, then
> his binaries have the same limitation.)
> 
> So let's forget about Windows 2000; it's irrelevant for this thread,
> if not for any other thread.

So we can, in fact, ditch ANSI support and use UNICODE everywhere?


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