KDE Windows and releases

[Jarosław Staniek]

Ralf Habacker said the following, On 2007-12-19 10:34:
> Shane King schrieb:
>> 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. ;)
>>   
> This was discussed already on the KDE on windows meeting this year in 
> berlin very intensive
> 
> One of reasons why msvc wasn't taken as prefered compiler was that qt 
> has no official msvc support. This reason has gone because Trolltech has 
> official support for the msvc 2005 compiler.
> 
> On more reason against msvc was the hope that big companies would 
> sponser further mingw development - Jaruslav: Do you have news about this ?

Not really, IIRC the idea (of supporting it) was rather our private 'wish' at 
the time. Patrick, do you have anything new to add?

> One reason against mingw was that debugging kde applications with gdb 
> would be very hard because of very very long debug info loading time and 
> that there is no gui available - is anyone there who can give an update ?
> 
>> * 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.
>>   
> For the technical decision I have some questions:
> 
> 1. Is it possible to use dll's created with Visual Studio 2005 with VS 
> 2008 ?
> 2. Is it possible to use dll's created with Visual Studio 2008 with VS 
> 2005 ?
> 3. Is it possible to use dll's created with Visual Studio Express 2005 
> with the other versions VS 2005  and VS2008 ?

Very good question. I need to ask on one of the MS 'product' news groups re. 
questions #1 and #2. Stay tuned.

Regarding question #3 - I cannot believe it would not be possible.

One remark for any version of msvc - IIRC debug versions of the 'system' 
msvc*d.dll libraries are not be redistributable. Not a problem for developers 
since they would have already installed msvc that contains msvc*d.dll.
But users would not be able to run 'development' version of the apps as long 
as it is a build with debug information. But I'll ask about this on a group as 
well.

Re msvc 2003 I am indeed considering finishing 'support' for it by the 
beginning of 2008 anyway.

> 4. Are any side effects known in one of the above mentioned case ?
> 
> At least this depends on having people doing this releases which also 
> means those people must have a license of the related compiler  (except 
> the msvc 2005 Express for which no license is required)

Even if I have nto compared the new and old licenses, there's msvc 2008 
Express freeware too.

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek
  Sponsored by OpenOffice Polska (http://www.openoffice.com.pl/en) to work on
  Kexi & KOffice (http://www.kexi.pl/en, http://www.koffice.org/kexi)
  KDE Libraries for MS Windows (http://windows.kde.org)