KDE packaging

[Ralf Habacker]

Hi all,

I had been asked some time ago from an online news paper if there are
already binary packages available and I had to negate this :-( 

One reason for this is the early state of the port and other reasons
which should have been discussed. So I like to start such a thread with 
the hope that we can move a step more into that direction. From my
knowledge the following packages are required:

windbus
kdewin32
several packages from www.gnuwin32.org
qt 4.2 with qdbus  (not official supported)
kdelibs
kdebase
kde...

Currently several packages are only available as source in svn or as
zip-file, several as binary packages, but in all there are several
download locations and several access methods (ftp,http,svn) .

windbus
    - currently in windbus svn, older source tarballs available
    - contains required runtime libraries (libxml2.dll, libiconv.dll   
mingw: mingw10.dll   msvc: ...)
    - question: would it be possible to release msvc and mingw in one
package ? Or is it required to release separates packages because by the
different runtime libraries

kdewin32
    - currently in kde svn
    - different binary packages required - contains c++ code
    - released with kdelibs ?

gnuwin32
    - binary package available
    - mingw/msvc support in one package
    - released with kdelibs ?

qt 4.2 with qdbus 
    - source in qtwin cvs, patches in windbus sf project
    - different binary packages for mingw and msvc
    - are any trademark issues to expect for making binary packages ?

kdelibs
    - source in svn and as tar balls  http://developer.kde.org/source/
    - different binary packages for mingw and msvc
    - releases as one big library or should/could it be splitted into
smaller pieces [1]?

kdebase
    - source in svn and as tar balls  http://developer.kde.org/source/
    - different binary packages for mingw and msvc

kde...
    - source in svn and as tar balls  http://developer.kde.org/source/
    - different binary packages for mingw and msvc


[1] package sizes for mingw (msvc may differ)
recent kdelibs binaries without debug informations requires about 61 MB
on disk - this would be the basic package  (kdelibs-bin)
development header and import libraries for developing additional kde
packages requires 42 MB on disk.  (kdelibs-devel)
debug informations requires about 418 MBytes on disk  (kdelibs-devel too
or kdelibs-debug)

Providing more packages as binaries would make it easier for people to
enter KDE4 user and developer experience on windows and would increase
the number of people involved into this project as far as I can see.

Are there any comments ?

Ralf