kde installer in kdewin32 svn

[Peter Kümmel]

Ralf Habacker wrote:
> Do you have read 
> http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/kdesupport/kdewin32/installer/doc/readme.txt 

It read more like a wishlist but I'm not sure why we need such a flexible
tool, at the moment we(?) just release some binaries which could be installed
without problems.

> 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 

It's not necessary to build it by hand only to download it.

> 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 ? 

Yes, when we do one release every couple of months this isn't
that hard I think.

> 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.
> 

I would only release full packages.

> 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.

Ok, your point, when you've already used inno setup and think it will
only produce problems.

But I'm still not sure if we need such a flexible install behavior
as described in your document.

> 
> 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.

But how much time does it cost to create such a installer?

> 
> 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 

When we have a tested file structure which we only zip to one big file
this is no problem.

> 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

As I understand it, your approach is in principle better but
we had to "reivent the wheel' a bit, but if someone has the time
to do this I don't have a problem with that.

Peter