ASCEND modelling environment Files

THIRD-PARTY DEPENDENCIES FOR ASCEND

In this folder we provide a number of third-party dependencies for ASCEND
on Windows that are not included in the installer package, but which are
required for ASCEND to run properly. The installer will download these 
files from here during the installation.

We have packaged the GTK+ bundles from ftp.gnome.org into a convenient
.exe installer that our ASCEND installer can launch and install silently.
The user can see that this is happening, but no user intervention is
needed. This has the advantage that a single copy of GTK can exist on
the user's system and it doesn't need to be updated for every new ASCEND
release. The GTK installer registers itself in the Windows registry.

As well the GTK+ bundle, we also provide the PyCairo, PyGObject and PyGTK
python modules from Christophe Gohlke, since his website does not permit
automated downloading. Very sneaky. But good quality packages, both 32
and 64 bit, not available elsewhere that we have found.

During installation, ASCEND also downloads Python itself, but we don't
host copies of that here. It is grabbed from python.org directly.

Eventually we may wish to move towards embedding all these things into
our ASCEND installer, however that's a big job and the current approach
is easier and seems to work OK for our (highly intelligent) users!

-- 
John Pye
26 Apr 2012