Question about goal of Windows/Mac frameworks

[Dominik Haumann]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2015 at 8:23 PM, Christoph Cullmann <cullmann at absint.com> wrote:
> 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.

I fully support that, based on the following reasoning:

What's important to realize is that deployment under Windows works different
to deployment under Linux: In Linux, you have the package manager which
automatically drags in all correct dependencies and you are fine.

In Windows, such a package manager does not exist. KDE tried to create
such a package manager through the emerge/KDE Windows installer, but
this is non-standard [on Windows] and simply not what users want.

Speaking for Kate or KWrite, we want one downloadable .zip/installer that
just installs Kate/KWrite, and that's it. Yes, that implies that Kile, KDevelop,
... will again install Qt and all the required frameworks, but this is
how things
work on Windows, and that's perfectly fine (size is not an issue).

So thanks a lot Christoph for your work on making self-contained frameworks,
that's definitely the correct solution.

Incidentally, this solution is probably also desirable for commercial usage of
our KF5 frameworks: Commercial applications often want to ship everything
themselves, and having self-contained libraries that do not depend on additional
files in some other installation folder does exactly this.
In other words: having self-contained libraries is also a plus on Linux.

Cheers,
Dominik