Re: deployment issues on windows

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 2005-07-14 08:52:36 +0100 Lloyd Dupont <lloyd@nova-mind.com> wrote:

> OK, I know, I have the source....
> Anyway let me explain the problem and maybe someone could show me a quick 
> fix.
>
> It seems that all GNUstep based application need to be deployed is 
> GNUstep's 
> DLLs, plus to set the environment variable:
> GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_ROOT to point to a directory containing the content of 
> <GNUstep>/System
>
> so far so good.
>
> Now I'm on windows, remember! and I don't want to mess with the user's 
> environment variable or use (disgusting) launching script (you know, these 
> bat file or 'special' shortcuts), etc.. I just want to click on my 
> application's exe (with a nice Icon) and here you go, it just runs!
>
> I was thinking to simply have a call to putenv() at the start of my 
> application which setup a correct value for GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_ROOT.
>
> However this is not reliable (i.e. it sometimes work, sometimes not ;-( 
> yeah, 
> I know, sometimes...).
> Part of the problem, I believe, is that environment variable are cached 
> when 
> the NSProcessInfo class is initialized (hence change to them at later date 
> are useless).
>
> Now I wonder how to fix that without breaking anything (you know, I'm new 
> to 
> that code, etc.....)

You could probably control this by calling 
[NSProcessInfo+initializeWithArguments:count:environment:]

Setting the environment (_environ variable) before loading the GNUstep 
libraries would probably work too.

Using the windows registry (see NSPathUtilities.m) to define the location of 
the GNUstep system, rather than the environment variable, shoudl also work 
(though I'ver not tried it myself).