Changes on MS Windows in version 2.23

Briefly: In version 2.23 the compilation and packaging of Gwyddion for MS Windows has substantially changed. So while it is the same program, the upgrade from a pre-2.23 version to 2.23 or later may require some care.

Overview
Users
Developers

Overview of the changes

The main changes are as follows:

• Gwyddion is built using the GNU toolchain instead of MSVC 6.
• Consequently, binary compatibility is not ensured.
• The installer includes bundled Gtk+ runtime.
• The layout of installation directory was unified with Unix.

Information for users

The only recommended upgrade method is following:

• backup any custom modules or data you might put into the Gwyddion installation directory,
• uninstall the pre-2.23 Gwyddion,
• uninstall the Gtk+-runtime package (unless you have other programs that use it),
• install the new Gwyddion.

The new installer does not try to detect and replace pre-2.23 versions of Gwyddion.

The new Gwyddion installer includes Gtk+ runtime for easier single-step installation. Do not install the separate Gtk+ runtime package unless you have other programs that use it; Gwyddion will use the bundled version even if you install it.

To downgrade to a pre-2.23 version, you also should remove the new version and then install the old version afresh.

The layout of the installation directory is the same as on Unix systems now. This is only important if you put custom modules or data into the Gwyddion installation directory (as opposed to gwyddion directory in your Documents and Settings which has not changed). Modules are in lib\gwyddion\modules now and data are in share\gwyddion.

Third-party extensions might work only with pre-2.23 versions or only with version 2.23+. The authors of the extensions should specify which Gwyddion versions it works with.

Known issues:

• Sometimes, the 3D view is drawn over other 3D controls that only appear if you move mouse over them. The reason is probably some incompatibility of GtkGLExt (that released last version 5+ years ago) and newer Gtk+ in combination with certain graphics drivers.

We do not have the expertise to fix them. If you have or know more about the probable root cause please help.

Information for developers

TODO

The official Win32 executables are cross-compiled using Fedora MinGW64 cross-compilaton environment. The procedure is described in the user guide. It is suggested that you use this method to compile Gwyddion or extensions. The sample external module threshold-example supports this method since version 2.1.

However, we are also interested in reports of native MinGW64 compilation (i.e. under MS Windows) and cross-compilation in other distributions, both successful and unsuccessful, as they should work too.