[gdal-dev] "Minimalist" GDAL 1.6.2 / 1.6.3 binaries for Windows to work around Xerces binary conflicts?

[Joaquim Luis]

Jason Roberts wrote:
> Hi Joaquim,
>
> Thanks for sharing your experience with that. Fortunately I have not hit the
> compatibility problem with other libraries. Perhaps it is because I'm using
> the MATLAB Compiler / MATLAB Component Runtime (MCR, not mex, and only
> referencing a very limited number of MATLAB functions and toolboxes. My
> guess is that those other libraries are delay loaded or explicitly loaded,
> and that I'm just getting lucky by not using MATLAB to read netCDFs, for
> example.
>   

Hmm, I use the compiler as well, but not that 
pretend-to-be-a-compiler-one.  I use the good old one 6.5 true compiler.

> The approach you recommend, renaming those common libraries, seems like a
> good way to deal with it.
>   

Actually, I'm afraid it's not that simple. We can't just rename the 
dlls, we have to rebuild them with a different name.

> Frank W mentioned in a private email that he thought that GDAL is using
> binaries provided by the Xerces team. If that is indeed the case, then this
> Xerces compatibility issue may arise from ESRI or MathWorks compiling their
> own Xerces, rather than using the one provided by the Xerces team. In that
> case, I would say that ESRI and MathWorks are breaking interoperability, and
> I'd have a hard time making a case that GDAL should do anything different...
>   

Absolutely true according to my experience. TMW, which I know better, 
behaves like it has the "King in the belly" (a Portuguese saying). They 
just don't give a shit for the official libraries and ship their own 
ones, which wouldn't be a problem if it didn't interfere with the 
outside world, but they do.
I had also troubles with ArcGis that installed old incompatible 
zlib1.dll under Windows/system32. Just imagine the chaos that it 
produced on the classroom machines (for that one I'm free, since by 
principle I don't get nearer than 5 m to a computer with Arcs in it).