[Request] Would it be possible to make available binaries for windows, for gtk?
Hello gtk-devs,
With gtk 4 eventually coming, I wanted to ask whether it would be possible to offer gtk-binaries for "vanilla" (but modern) windows. So, Win10 only.
gtk 4 does not have much to do with win10 but I would like to provide a perspective that perhaps has not been heard before.
If you look at the current gtk-site, you can read this for windows:
https://www.gtk.org/docs/installations/windows/
These instructions are intended for developers wanting to create Windows applications based on GTK, not for end-users. On Windows, GTK applications are typically bundled with GTK already, so end-users do not need to worry about how to install GTK itself.
Together with that strange statement, those two sentences, we sadly do not have a gtk-binary as download for vanilla windows.
It mentions two alternatives: MSYS2 and gvsbuild. I do not know the latter, but I know msys/msys2 and that one was fine.
But!
It is not really an alternative in my opinion to standalone .exe files or .msi files where we just install the GTK runtime on windows. I would like to have this.
Why would I want to have this?
Well, I am using ruby-gtk a lot, and I know that these widgets work on windows. I used them many years ago, and since then hopefully gtk has gotten even better. But ... the awkward thing is ... it is now harder (!) than it used to be to get this up and running on windows.
In fact! It is MUCH SIMPLER to simply use WSL1/WSL2 these days, use xming/mingx or whatever the name is, and start such GTK applications from the linux subsystem. That is about 10000x easier than getting gtk to work on windows. So ... my issue is already resolved, but by windows, not by GTK.
My request would be: could you guys provide GTK binaries for windows as a platform too? I mean native windows; getting this to work on plain WSL is simple nowadays. But I would also like to get my code to work on native windows as-is for older machines without WSL.
An additional problem is that I actually do this primarily for other people, elderly people who have a hard time dealing with computers (for my own use cases, I use mostly linux anway + batch-commandline processes, but for elderly people a GUI can be really helpful, if it is not confusing).
I compile everything from source on linux, so keeping up to date with the gtk-stack is quite trivial, but I don't really feel like wanting to deal with windows-specific oddities simply because I don't use windows enough to be really knowledgable about it at the current time.
If gtk-binaries were available, that would simplify the process a little. This does not need be made available regularly, but, say, once per year? Perhaps there could be some build bot that could automate this? If the code can be compiled on windows then automation should be possible. But admittedly I know way too little about windows to really know whether this is the case.
Last but not least, the two sentences are odd because they claim that every developer will distribute windows-gtk binaries. But what about hobbyist programmers? Many of them, including me :-), don't even know how to do that; I am glad I get along really well on linux, but windows is an area of lots of unknowns (I have used it for so many years before, though, and that also shows how much I don't know or have learned on it).