[osgeo4w-dev] Re: osgeo4w-dev Digest, Vol 14, Issue 6

[Frank Warmerdam]

Isaac Ullah wrote:
> I do have a libtiff.dll in /C/Windows/system32. I see another user had
> some success by removing this dll, but I do not wish to do this as
> other programs (especially graphics software) on my system most
> probably have this particular dll as a dependancy. Since i see that
> hte OSgeo4W PATH variable incorporates all items in the system path, I
> also tried to remove (temporarily) C\windows\system32\ from my system
> path, but this was no good as the OSgeo4W shell would not load. Is
> there any less drastic work around than simply deleting libtiff.dll
> from system32?

Isaac,

The only other way I know to force the program to use "our" libtiff.dll is
to ensure that C:\OSgeo4W\bin is the current working directory when run the
program.  I don't recall what program you were running, but it may be possible
to cd to c:\OSGeo4W\bin in the OSGeo4W shell, and then run the program from
there.

In general it is extremely hard for OSGeo4W to prevent other applications from
interfering with it by installing stuff in c:\windows\system32.

In some cases we use unique names for our DLLs (ie. the jpeg dll). In others
we actually try and install our DLL if it is newer than the one in the
system directory (recently done with the SSL DLLs).

If you file a ticket on this, I will look into renaming the TIFF DLL.  But to
do this I need to relink and reupload ever application linking directly
against libtiff.dll.  This is at least all the GDALs, likely also GRASS.
Also libgeotiff.  So this is a difficult thing to do for base DLLs.

I would note that copying the OSGeo4W libtiff.dll to \windows\system32
is likely to break any other application using libtiff.dll since we are
distributing with a development version of "libtiff 4.0".  The ABI is
noticably different than the traditional libtiff 3.x series.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent