kde installer in kdewin32 svn

[Matt Williams]

On Wednesday 03 January 2007 01:03, Ralf Habacker wrote:
> Jarosław Staniek schrieb:
> > Ralf Habacker said the following, On 2007-01-03 01:31:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> some month ago there was work done to get a kde installer for win32.
> >>
> >> The idea is to have a qt command line and/or gui application, which
> >> makes it possible to download and install
> >>
> >> - gnuwin32 and/or win32libs related packages
> >> - kde binary and source packages
> >> - packages from other sources
> >>
> >>
> >> The design allows to use different download types (for example from a
> >> sourceforge project or other locations reachable by http) and/or
> >> different download mirrors.
> >>
> >> The command line tool works currently well for gnuwin32 related
> >> packages. Adding additional installer for example to install 7zip
> >> packages from the win32libs download area is very easy. Using an
> >> different download strategy is also easy.
> >>
> >> The gui installer is in a very early state and not functional.
> >>
> >> The sources could inspected on using
> >> http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/kdesupport/kdewin32/installer/
> >
> > Great! IMHO it's a good choice to have own installer. I use NSIS on win32
> > for KDElibs3 and I am already tired because of this.
>
> Then you should try inno setup.
>
> >  Also MSI installers will not get us as much control as the hand-made
> > one.
>
> and they are inreliable.
>
> For installing single packages using an open source installer like NSIS
> or it's counterparts Inno Setup http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php is
> very good especially when the build system can create such package
> automatically, but to download and install all the required third party
> libraries would be a night mare and the kde-installer is not targeted to
> replace NSIS or Inno Setup.

I've used NSIS myself and you're right, it's very good for when you've got 
everything you need local. It's not designed to go retreiving packages of the 
internet.

I think this installer will be much needed in order to reduce the barrier 
there is before you can run kde4.

> Currently we need
>
> - dbus package
> - qt package
> - gnuwin32 or win32libs runtime package
> - additional libraries for example boost, db for kdevelop
> - additional tools from elsewhere for example perl, python and others

Is this installer designed to be used by people when KDE4 comes out so they 
can install what they need in order to run a KDE program or is it aimed at us 
developers so we can develop KDE Windows applications?

If the latter, what about a c++ compiler? I know there's a version of the Qt 
installer which will download and install MinGW for you. I don't think you 
should assume that people have a working compiler (at least once we get to 
release).

> This installer should get all informations where the related packages
> are located and would be able to download all required packages and to
> install the package directly when it is packaged in gz, bzip2, 7zip or
> zip format or to call the related setup if the downloaded package is an
> executable.

I assume it (will) checks to see if said packages are _already_ installed and 
whether they of a high enough version.

> I can also image to be able to download and install rpm packages - for
> example KDE language packages - without repackaging, but this is future.
>
> For now the the command line installer uses qtcore and qtnetwork
> libraries and would be a static qt application in the long run to be
> independent from any other dll.
>
> Are there any additional comments or contributions ?
>
> Ralf
-- 
http://milliams.com