Some ideas about the kdewin-installer

[Saro Engels]

I just started helping in kde-windows some weeks ago, and since I don't 
really know what to improve in kde's libraries and because I'd love to 
have a package manager on windows, I decided to focus my efforts on 
kdewin-installer.

kdewin-installer is made up like the cygwin setup.exe which most of us 
will know. I didn't found any roadmap for kdewin-installer so perhaps we 
can make up something like that over here.
Some features I would like to see in kdewin-installer:
- A possibility to update packages; cygwin's setup.exe uses both a
   local database which contains all the installed packages and on the
   mirrors a database of the newest packages. kdewin-installer makes the
   same but still has no update/reinstall feature implemented
- A possibility to view the files contained in an (installed) package;
   this feature is missing in cygwin but is contained in YaST2 of
   openSuSE etc.
- A possibility to add mirrors / to use a local package repository;
   this is implemented in cygwin as well - and I am currently working on
   the first issue, probably svn-up'ing it this weekend. The second issue
   I might implement next (that would need at least to add a repository
   database file).
- the kdewin-installer should give a possibility to get to the package
   page from the 'finished' page; that is quite an easy thing that I can
   do very easily.
- as someone told me in irc, proxies sometimes need a user and password;
   we should provide those settings as well, even though one can import
   those settings from the browser.
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Some features that would be good to be implemented in future:
- integrating cygwin's installer; I personally prefer the possibilities
   of a real gui installer/package manager.
- integrating the possibility to download other non-kde/non-cygwin open
   source apps (all the gnu stuff); if we don't want to repackage
   everything that will depend on the following issue:
- integrating other package formats; This is an issue I think of since
   the start. Currently we use zip-packages. Since CMake is able to build
   nsis-selfextracting installers as well, I thought about using those
   instead of zip-packages (for installing with _and_ without
   kdewin-installer). My first thought was using them like normal 7z/zip
   packages and to extract the information the nsi-script puts into it
   from it using the qua7zip the kdewin-installer contains. That would
   mean as well, that all informations to be set in the registry by the
   the nsi-installer had to be set by the kdewin-installer itself(so I
   implemented the registry-io-functions). After a while I thought about
   making it easier: If a normal nsi-installer could give me the infos
   itself (by running it with some options) we could just use QProcess
   and install it quietly in the background. That would free
   kdewin-installer of lots of code - which is needed to install etc. a
   package. The problem now is that nsi-installers are gui-apps which are
   not able to produce any output on stdout normally. With a hack I could
   produce this output on winxp/vista but it seems that it won't work
   on win2k. I didn't got any further and would like to hear some
   opinions.

It seems that more than half of the devels went on vacation - I will
send a link to this issue again in some weeks.
Saro