[ogg-dev] Re: Summer of Code: subtitle editor

[Timothy B. Terriberry]

Ralph Giles wrote:
> I think for Windows and MacOS it just makes the application large 
> because you have to embed the python interpreter. I don't use Windows,
> but such applications seem to take a long time to launch on macos. Once 
> running they are responsive. Personally, I think the GStreamer and GTK 
> dependencies are much more of an issue for porting to Windows and MacOS.

I've some experience with GTK on Windows, and it works fairly well. The
simplest approach is just to ship all of the GTK libraries as part of
the application (stored in the same directory as the application
itself). It makes the download a little larger (by about 3MB) than if
they were separate, but it's dead simple to install and maintain. I
assume a similar strategy would work for GStreamer. We can worry about a
more polished approach (a la the Gimp installer) later.

The actual compilation (including an installer .exe) can be done
entirely from Linux using the mingw cross-compiler and wine. This is a
little bit of work to set up, but once done, you can develop for all
platforms using only open source tools.

I believe a similar approach works for MacOS X by just using (mostly)
static linking. However, the user will still be required to install an X
server (included with the OS, but not installed by default as I
understand it) to run the application. I've less direct experience here
since I don't actually own a Mac, but Arek Korbik (author of our
Qucktime components, mailto:arkadini at gmail.com) may be able to help.