MSI installer for KDE4?

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Freitag, 22. August 2008, Patrick Spendrin wrote:
> ok, after reading all your questions and fears, here is what I think
> about it:
> As Christian and Jaroslaw pointed out, the exact way to install or
> package is irrelevant - whether the installers are called nsis or msi or
> kdewin-installer, whether we build with mingw or mingw cross-compiled or
> msvc is a question of believe (well a bit work and money too).

I disagree in that msi or nsis will have different expectations
attached from the person that uses theses files and
that technology matters if we want a good build, test and update process.

> The problem is somewhere else:
> We haven't come over to a good idea how to ship KDE.
> We currently ship KDE in the packages according to KDE modules.
> This has several disadvantages:
> - We can't ship single applications.
> - There are a lot of third party libraries which each have their own
> package - each has its own version, each has its own binary
> compatibility etc. (think of dll hell)
> To illustrate this a bit here is a small bug:
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=169475
> It comes from mixing two different versions of KDE (4.0.83 and 4.1.0)
> which seems very likely to break.
>
> Thats why my proposal is something else:
> We decide to give a version number to the following packages:
> complete win32libs
> complete qt
> complete kdesupport
> kdelibs, kdepimlibs and kdebase-runtime
> The version number can be made up like K.D.E.XXXX.compiler
> where K.D.E is the KDE version number and XXXX is a version bumped when
> any underlying libraries are changed (e.g. for security reasons) and
> compiler is a name for the compiler used.
> This meta-package should be shown in the installer so users can be asked
> for its version in bug reports, it should be rebuildable (shouldn't be
> to much a problem) and it can be installed by all possible installers
> thus. All KDE applications should be build on top of one specific
> version of this meta package.
>
> If you are all ok with that, I will try to find a working solution to
> test with the upcoming KDE 4.1.1 or 4.1.2 release.

Having a meta package that pinpoints one set of other packages
and thus making problem reports easier looks like a step forwards to me.

> I will implement some changes to make the build of single applications
> possible too.

Sounds good as well.


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