[ms4w-users] Mapserver broken? ms4w 1.5.2

[Daniel Morissette]

Paul Spencer wrote:
> aren't we already defeating the purpose by putting all the dlls  inside 
> the ms4w folder?  The idea of ms4w is to distribute a set of  binaries 
> that all work together regardless of what else might be  installed on 
> the system (for instance some other copy of gdal.dll  gets installed 
> into system32 by some other application)
> 

So far we distributed only our own non-Windows DLLs (i.e. GDAL, PROJ, 
etc.), that's kind of defeating the purpose of DLLs too, but since those 
are very specialized stuff unlikely to be shared by many apps then I 
didn't find it's as big a deal as redistributing some generic Windows DLLs.

> I think these files must to be distributed with ms4w inside the ms4w  so 
> we don't overwrite newer system files but we ensure that we are  
> distributing a complete package.
> 

Yup.

> The alternative is to offer a separate download/instructions if you  are 
> missing those files.  I believe an automated installer would  accomplish 
> this, but in the zip file world we don't have a lot of choice
> 

Custom instructions or an install.bat that tries to detect whether the 
DLLs exist on the system is what I had in mind. (Of course an automated 
installer in the style of what FGS does would take this one step further.)

But as Frank pointed in his other reply, including those DLLs should not 
hurt anything and that helps keep things simple, so you can just ignore 
my comments.

Daniel
-- 
Daniel Morissette
http://www.mapgears.com/