MSI installer for KDE4

[Pau Garcia i Quiles]

Quoting Bernhard Reiter <bernhard at intevation.de>:

> 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?

AFAIK, they are not.

>> 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.

There is apt-get for Windows but I don't think we need that. We  
already have an installer which works and resolves dependencies. What  
would be the advantage in moving to another dependency-solver which  
does the same thing?

>
>> * 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

Both MSI and NSIS allow this.

> b) the update paths

Tricky. What about having a "KDE update service" running on the  
background which checks what versions of the KDE applications are  
installed? That's what Sun does for Java, Google for their apps  
bundle, etc

> c) trust, e.g. signed binaries

Do you mean "signed binaries" as in "sign all the .exes and .dlls" or  
as in "sign the installer/uninstaller" ?

These may be worth looking at:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa371854(VS.85).aspx
http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Signing_an_Uninstaller

> 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.

A few months ago I proposed we include CPack "code" in KDE's  
CMakeLists.txt. Fail.

That would have allowed us to have .deb, .rpm, .src.tar.gz and NSIS  
installers for everything. As NSIS is cross-platfrom (for package  
creation, at least), CPack even allows to create the NSIS installers  
on a Unix machine.

-- 
Pau Garcia i Quiles
http://www.elpauer.org
(Due to my workload, I may need 10 days to answer)