and yet another distribution kit question

[menchar]

Why does my application insist on loading NI Max, and also then the NI Vision 8.5 Acquisition Software?

If I include the GPIB 488.2 library in the distribution, it then forces inclusion of Max, and then the NI Vision library, which it can't find, and demands access to a CD with thevision library on it.  

There's nothing in the application that refers to any NI Vision function!  My development PC doesn't have any NI HW in it at all.

Menchar

[Mert_A.]

I don't know the specifics of this dependency chain, but in general, when declaring dependencies, the drivers err on the side of simplicity rather than efficiency. Likely, some sub-feature or utility in the GPIB distributable won't work without NI MAX. Assuming it's a commonly enough used piece, the driver will declare that dependency. Regarding the Vision dependency, you probably had NI Vision installed on this machine at the time MAX was installed/updated, and so MAX installed some Vision-specific sub-feature. Now, in order to re-distribute MAX with all the features and functionality that it has on your source machine, it has to distribute that Vision-specific sub-feature, which in turn needs NI Vision to work. Admittedly this isn't an ideal situation, but between fatter distributions, and distributions with a missing component, the policy assumes the former is the lesser of two evils.

You may be able to get around this issue by modifying your MAX installation. If you go to Add/Remove Products and choose to modify MAX, you should be presented with a feature tree. In that feature tree, if you see some NI Vision related feature, you can unselect it and have it uninstalled. If there's no visible NI Vision feature, you might have to uninstall NI Vision then reinstall MAX. Unfortunately that will probably require uninstalling/reinstalling other software that depend on MAX.

Mert A.

National Instruments

[menchar]

I ripped out NI - IMAQ with add / remove programs but whenever I try to add IEEE 488.2 library to my distribution it still demands the NI Vision CD.

This sux, big time.  Really.

How completely weird is it that I can't distribute an application that doesn't use any NI Vision SW of any kind without including the NI Vision libraries?  Simply because the host system may have had an NI Vision product on it at some point in time?  And it's all triggered by adding the IEEE 488.2 library which drags in the max which drags in the vision junk?  And there's no way I can prevent this?  This is too weird for words.

I updated to 8.5.1 in the hope that would cure the problem, but it didn't.

I don't even have the NI Vision CD.

Not an ideal situation?  How about a just plain stupid situation.

[Mert_A.]

Just because you're being asked for the NI Vision CD does not necessarily mean that the NI Vision library itself is being included. Actually, if you've uninstalled NI Vision from your machine, that confirms that the Vision library is not the reason for that CD prompt. Rather, when NI Vision was installed from that CD, at least one other shared component was apparently upgraded in the process. That component is presumably is a dependency of MAX (or maybe MAX itself was upgraded by the NI Vision CD), and so now when distributing MAX, you're prompted for the NI Vision distro, too. This knowledge base article explains the situation in detail. It's in the context of LabVIEW, but it applies to CVI exactly the same.

In order to re-distribute the NI components that are installed on your system, you must have access to the source CDs (or have them backed up somewhere in digital form). Unfortunately, I can't provide any workaround for that.

Mert A.

National Instruments