Packaging Windows apps so as not to require separate GNUstep install

[Eric Wasylishen]

Hi,
Earlier this year I was working on porting a Cocoa app to windows
(http://heronsperch.blogspot.com/2010/04/heres-toetag.html). There's
still a bit left to do before it's ready to release, but I was
wondering if anyone has investigated packaging Windows apps so they
can installed without requiring a separate step of installing GNUstep.

I can think of three potential approaches:
1. the approach GTK apps use. When you install Pidgin, for instance,
if you don't have the GTK runtime environment installed it will
automatically download and install it, so it's more or less
transparent to the user. Then, if you install other GTK apps they
should reuse the installed copy.

2. a normal installer which installs a private copy of the GNUstep
libraries in the application's directory.

3. "portable applications" - i.e., you just unzip a zip file, or run
the application inside it's app directory on a USB drive, and it works
on any computer.

Thoughts?

-Eric