[osgeo4w-dev] mscvr90

[Matt Wilkie]

> The dev-90 package depends on msvc*71.dll (Visual 2003) and does not
> depend on msvc*90.dll, so no problem here.

...but when I tested dev-90 without msvc*71.dll in PATH tiffinfo still 
works.

> But the worst thing is that these msvc*dll are handled differently than
> the other dlls (they can be found in this winsxs folder while it is not
> in the PATH).

Oh. Does this mean there is no way at all to test "without X in path"? 
That does indeed suck.

...got me reading up what winsxs is, and oh my, is this ever a rabbit 
hole. Or a tarpit. Lots of conflicting information, in authoritative 
tones of course. The links /appear/ to have some of the best info. 
Though they're all focussed on the prolem of disk space consumption it 
does reveal some bits about how winsxs appears to work. This in 
particular catches my attention:

''' In practice, nearly every file in the WinSxS directory is a “hard 
link” to the physical files elsewhere on the system—meaning that the 
files are not actually in this directory. For instance in the WinSxS 
there might be a file called advapi32.dll that takes up >700K however 
what’s being reported is a hard link to the actual file that lives in 
the Windows\System32  '''

There's other information which indicates the hardlinks go the other 
way, the real file is in winsxs and the link in program files or 
wherever. In any case which in the context of our problem may actually 
mean winsxs is not always searched, rather that it's reached by way of 
the link in path. Perhaps. (?)


http://www.winvistaclub.com/f16.html
http://serverfault.com/questions/79485/windows-2008-winsxs-directory-growing-uncontrollably-blocking-server
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itproperf/thread/09578403-a363-49ac-beb1-33f0da8d0e25
http://superuser.com/questions/1/why-does-the-winsxs-folder-grow-so-large-and-can-it-be-made-smaller

-matt