MSI installer for KDE4

[Bernhard Reiter]

Hello All,

On Thursday 21 August 2008 13:40, Pau Garcia i Quiles wrote:
> Quoting "Aaron J. Seigo" <aseigo at kde.org>:
> > On Thursday 21 August 2008, you wrote:
> >> Is (or will be) there any MSI installer for kde4 on windows?
> > I really don't know, but I'm CC'ing the kde-windows team because
> > they probably
> > *do* know ;)

this is also a question running around in my mind, 
so here is my take on it:

> This is something I'd like to see. 

This seems to be a common wish, but with my current state of knowledge
I would recommend KDE to _not_ build MSI installers.
My opinion might change when I learn more, but
currently the problem I see is QA effort and high expectations.
MSI will make people believe that there is more QA done than there actually 
can be for an overseeable amount of time. The installers will underdeliver 
them. An nsis installer would fit the expectations better. 

> There was some chatting about this 
> at  aKademy and I was reading more about side-by-side assemblies
> before writing but here comes a "mind --dump".
>
> Not MSI installers necessarily, but standalone application installers
> which only contain the application binaries and, maybe, some specific
> dependencies.

We will see some application specific installers,
e.g. gpg4win.org upcoming version 2 comes with an nsis installer 
that has Kleopatra inside. Kontact enterprise4 will have a standalone 
installer.

This is a good thing, IMHO, if it is _not_ done with MSI.

> Using side-by-side
> assemblies (SxS, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa376307.aspx
> ), these libraries would be shared by all KDE applications and thanks
> to the versioning capabilities SxS provides, it would even be possible
> to have KDE 4.1 and KDE 4.2 applications (for instance, Parley from
> 4.2 and Kate for 4.1) without kdelibs 4.1 and 4.2 clashing.

Thanks for the link, I have to check into those SxS, are they available with 
gcc (mingw) also?

> Summarizing, what I propose is:
> * Have redistributable packages for kdelibs, kdepimlibs and
> kofficelibs, each one of them including its third-party dependencies

This would be the ideal world, it means a good dependency system
under windows. My gut feeling is that this is very hard to reach with
current windows tools. Also we would need something like smartpm 
which can resolve and install dependencies in a good way for windows,
which would be a major step to develop.

> * Standalone installers for applications, including the application
> and the 3rd party dependencies specific to that application

Again, I believe this would be a good thing.
For enterprise usage, we should look at:
a) unattended installation for software distribution systems 
b) the update paths
c) trust, e.g. signed binaries

Mainly we would need an automatic process to build binary and source code 
installers. I would want this to be completely with Free Software tools as 
well. For several technical reasons crosscompilation von GNU/Linux is my 
favorite for this.

Best,
Bernhard
-- 
Managing Director - Owner: www.intevation.net       (Free Software Company)
Germany Coordinator: fsfeurope.org. Coordinator: www.Kolab-Konsortium.com.
Intevation GmbH, Osnabrück, DE; Amtsgericht Osnabrück, HRB 18998
Geschäftsführer Frank Koormann, Bernhard Reiter, Dr. Jan-Oliver Wagner
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