KDE Windows and releases

[Shane King]

Just had a few thoughts about how KDE is going to work on Windows as a 
finished product somewhere along the line. For background, my blog post 
about Amarok Windows releases:

<http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/550-Windows-binaries-and-packaging.html>

As I see it, sometime in the not too distant future, Amarok 2 is going 
to go alpha on Linux, and we'd like to go alpha on Windows too. The 
difficulty is that you can really only have one KDE 4 installation per 
user (or at least only be running from one installation at a time), so 
to play nice with others, Amarok can't really package its own KDE 
libraries, there needs to be an "official" distribution.


For this to happen, I think we'd need to do the following:

* We need to pick a compiler. Keeping things compiling under multiple 
compilers is a good thing so we can change with circumstances, but for 
releases to work we need an official compiler.

Lets be honest: MSVC compiles faster, produces smaller binaries, (IMO 
seems to) produces faster code, has a better debugging environment, is 
the standard for windows development, just works with the PSDK without 
having to write your own headers and hasn't had the lead developer quit. 
On the other hand, the politics of choosing it over mingw are difficult. 
Not sure how you decide that one, glad it's not my call. ;)

* We'd need to have sort of nominal release schedule so that we can 
point people to it and say "yes, bug X is fixed and in the next release, 
we hope to have it out in 2 weeks". Of course we have very limited 
resources so we can't commit to anything concrete, but having a vague 
idea of when the next release is coming and what will be in it would be 
nice.

* Maybe not straight away, but we probably also need a real packaging 
format (with thing like pre-inst/post-inst scripts etc) so third parties 
can make packages against the base system. Ideally I should be able to 
do something like make my own Amarok package and send it out to test a 
bug fix and others can just install it so long as they have the 
dependencies installed via the installer.

Is porting something like dpkg or rpm even remotely possible/sensible? 
Or is it easier to just to a simpler custom implementation?



Now perhaps it's too soon to start thinking about this, but just like 
KDE on Unix going to release in part because they hope it will attract 
interest, perhaps there's merit in doing the same thing on Windows?

Thoughts? Has this been discussed before in the past and I've missed it? 
I did a quick google search but it didn't turn up anything quite along 
these lines.

As I said on my blog post, yay for Linux and someone else having to deal 
with turning source into binaries. :p

Shane.