Question about goal of Windows/Mac frameworks

[Jeremy Whiting]

Christoph,

I'm not trying to argue against having applications come in complete
bundles at all. That is a worthy goal also actually, it's just not the
direction I was headed in. You've made a lot more progress in this
regard than I had though tbh. I see the kdewin installer as something
that went away because it was tricky to set up, had a bus number of
one (I think only Saro was creating repositories for it iirc), so it
fell by the wayside at some point. I did use it to install my favorite
kde utilities on windows whenever I was stuck on windows for various
reasons though. It was useful to install ksnapshot, filelight, etc.
and have them use the same copy of kdelibs. Maybe with frameworks it's
not that important to share libraries between applications though. I'm
not sure.

I can understand arguments for both ways of doing things. Having each
application have it's own copy of Qt, KF5, etc. makes it possible to
know that those versions have been tested with the application code to
make sure it runs well etc. If applications are sharing one copy of Qt
and one of them upgrades it, it's not guaranteed to work the same way
as an older version (it's supposed to work, but I've seen enough
e-mail about Qt 5.x breaks plasma where it worked with Qt 5.x-1 to
know this isn't always the case in reality.)

Also, the work you're doing to make frameworks use bundled resources
will help both of the above use cases, so that's definitely an
improvement in my opinion.

I can see advanced users either using macports, fink, homebrew or a
download and install x,y,z and share libraries to install many of our
applications. I can also see the same power users recommending
individual applications to their relatives (moms, grandmothers, etc.)
using single application installers as you described. "Here mom,
download this one bundle to install kxstitch on your windows laptop."
etc. So there are advantages to both/all ways of going forward I
think.

BR,
Jeremy

On Tue, Oct 20, 2015 at 1:19 PM, Alexander Neundorf <neundorf at kde.org> wrote:
> On Tuesday, October 20, 2015 20:23:00 Christoph Cullmann wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>
>>
>
>> > Christoph.
>
>> >
>
>> > I have had similar goals for a while, but haven't reached the point
>
>> > that I was having much success yet in that regard. One thing to keep
>
>> > in mind when developing installers, Qt Installer Framework. I did a
>
>> > quick test with attica on OS X I can put on reviewboard to see what
>
>> > you think. I added a few lines to CMakeLists.txt to make it so you can
>
>> > do make package, and it uses CPack and Qt Installer Framework to
>
>> > create an installer application which can be used to download both
>
>> > attica and attica-devel packages for OSX. I bet we could put together
>
>> > a "meta" package for at least KF5 and maybe more which would consist
>
>> > of a CMakeLists.txt and a bunch of git clones beneath it could be used
>
>> > to create one OSX or Windows installer that could then be used to
>
>> > download applications and all their dependencies. I wasn't sure how to
>
>> > add dependency information to the result of CPack's QIFW generator,
>
>> > but it should be doable.
>
>> >
>
>> > The result of all of that would be one tool for OS X and a similar one
>
>> > for Windows that work exactly like the Qt online installers. Qt's
>
>> > online installers are meant for developers though, not end users, so
>
>> > we may need to improve QIF itself to make the resulting installer more
>
>> > user friendly, we'll see. I meant to blog about all of this a week or
>
>> > so ago, but haven't gotten around to it. What do you think of the idea
>
>> > in general though?
>
>>
>
>> I am not really a fan of that idea, to be honest.
>
>>
>
>> I think that is more or less what we had in the past with the "kdewin"
>
>> installer, that is like the cygwin installer pulling in all stuff you need
>
>> and a set of applications in some common prefix.
>
>>
>
>> I am not sure that was such a success, compared to what e.g. Krita,
>> Marble,
>
>> Digikam and others do: individual self-contained installers (or bundles).
>
>>
>
>> I really think we should focus on making frameworks fit for that and not
>
>> rebuilding some "micro-distro" with online installer for that operating
>
>> systems.
>
>>
>
>> But that is just my opinion, perhaps I am wrong with that.
>
>
>
> I fully agree with your POV.
>
>
>
> Alex
>
>
>
>
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