kde installer in kdewin32 svn

[Ralf Habacker]

Peter Kümmel schrieb:
> mark cox wrote:
>   
>> I'm not sure why you are re-inventing the wheel. inno setup is mature
>> installation software with many features and you can extend it to add those
>> missing features. In my experience, installers on windows always turn
>> out to
>> be much more complicated than anticipated and because inno setup is mature
>> it has already encountered and solved those problems.
>> website: www.innosetup.com
>>
>> mark
>>
>>
>> On 1/8/07, Ralf Habacker <ralf.habacker at freenet.de> wrote:
>>     
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> there is an updated spec of the installer available on
>>>
>>> http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/kdesupport/kdewin32/installer/doc/readme.txt?rev=620682&view=auto
>>>
>>> .
>>>
>>>
>>> Any suggestions too or sombody want's to help coding  beside Christian
>>> Ehrlicher, who had contributed already some patches ?
>>>
>>> Ralf
>>>
>>>       
>
> I use inno setup here:
> http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=29557&package_id=57553&release_id=425927
> (the .exe). It has a pascal like syntax, and when
> you wanna distribute all files within a directory and wanna call
> some .bat files it is very convenient.
> It has a build-in 7zip compression.
>
>   
> Wouldn't it be the simplest to just ship all files in one package.
> When someone doesn't want some specific libraries he should
> do it like a expert and use svn checkouts.
>
>   
Do you have read 
http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/kdesupport/kdewin32/installer/doc/readme.txt 
or verified kdelibs/share/apps/cmake/modules how much dependencies there 
are. The latter shows currently 47 find... entries, not included the 
additional tools  Do you like to build all such packages by hand to be 
able to compile KDE applications. Additional only downloading all these 
files by hand require much time.

The kde-installer supports you in the manner: 'okay, let's see which 
packages are required and where can I download it with one click'

Your refered setup.exe size is 134 KB, a zipped kdelibs with debug 
informations is about 138 MB, unpackaged 616 MB. Do you like to 
recompile your installer exe every time a little patch is required ? 
Sure, you can create additional installers which contains updates, but 
this ends up like the windows update service, where you have many 
installed patches in your software panel.

Then the next full update is out and you have to deinstall all patches 
by hand, which will create many confusions. I have used inno setup for 
KDE on cygwin and switched later to the cygwin installer in the long run 
because of problems with such updates.

In the opposite using an online installer like the kde-installer is,  
you can create a new patch directory on the kde mirrors, upload some 
zipped files, add little dependency informations to the installer main 
config files located on this mirror and users are able to use this 
patches immediatly. This belongs also to snapshots.

Inno Setup uses pascal and it might be not easy for non pascal users to 
learn all the required stuff. It is not very easy if you like to make 
more complicated things. Isn't it be more natural to use qt for a kde 
installer.

In the long run there will be required to have standalone package like 
Jaroslav had done for kexi, but who will maintain this in this state of 
the project. Are we all not happy to use available resources as much as 
possible ?

In my opinion the strategy is 'let's look where a binary packages for a 
required library or tool is and use it as available resource before 
recompiling it by myself.

There may be packages, which are unusable for kde like the missing 
symbol problem with libxml2 on the gnuwin32 site for which Christian had 
compiled a replacement in his win32libs distribution.

How do you be able to handle this with inno setup ?  The kde-installer 
could assist you in this area too by adding a rule in the main server 
based config file to exclude the libxml library from gnuwin32 site. 
Instead it would use the related packages from the win32libs website.

Ralf












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