Re: GnuTLS for W32

[Óscar Fuentes]

Juanma Barranquero <address@hidden> writes:

> On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 20:21, Óscar Fuentes <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> For a Windows binary package to be robust, it must be as self-contained
>> as possible. Quality-wise, one of the best decisions I ever made was to
>> distribute the C/C++ MS runtime dlls along with the rest of my binaries,
>> no matter they are already installed on virtually all MS Windows
>> machines. Certain long-standing, very nasty bugs simply went away.
>
> Assuming you're right,

You can bet on it. At the beginning there was several versions of
MSVCRT.DLL floating around, some of them notoriously buggy. Of course,
everybody installed the dll on system32. The problem was partially fixed
by SxS, which essentially ensured that applications that didn't embed
manifests (and hence didn't required a specific version of the dll) used
the default, "safe" one provided by MS with the OS. That started with
Windows XP, although it doesn't protect you from inadvertently picking a
dll inside a directory that comes first on PATH. With Windows 2000, I
had to face one of the more frustrating bugs on my career: a few users
reported crashes, freezes and data corruption (on a DB app!). It took me
months to discover the problem for one of the users: a mass storage
device driver and accompanying backup utility installed their own
custom-modified MSVCRT.DLL on system32, which somehow caused my app to
freeze when certain gui action was performed. They didn't bothered to
use a different version string or id on the resources of the library, so
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.

> that seems like a wonderful side project. Why
> not start a project to build a prepackaged Emacs binary installer for
> Windows? Aside from installing DLLs, it could set up other things
> (after asking the user, of course), like CUA mode, and other binaries,
> like a better ftp than the standard one.
>
> I do really believe that a user-friendly installer for Windows is a
> good idea. I strongly *don't* believe the Emacs project should bear
> the load of it.

I think that's more or less what Lennart is already doing, isn't it?

OTOH an installer that could act as an update tool for the dlls could be
interesting.