Feedback from an application developer

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hi,

the remainder of this mail will focus on some things, I'm not happy with, so 
before I forget, I should write that I am positively surprised by just how 
well the windows port is working. I really am, and I would like to thank you 
for your great work!

I am the main developer of RKWard, a KDE application developed outside of 
KDE's SVN repository. A while ago, I finally started working on a windows port 
of RKWard, and while there are still some remaining issues, we did release the 
first "official" version of RKWard on Windows, recently. So we had to find a 
decent way to create and distribute a windows binary. That turned out to be 
harder than expected:

1: Is it possible for external applications to provide a version of the 
windows installer that is customized to include the external application? From 
looking here and there, it appears to be designed to allow this, but how? Is 
there any documentation on this?

2: Is it possible in the windows installer to query the user for further 
information (my package needs another non-KDE library, and needs to install 
some parts into the directory where this is installed)? Alternatively, is it 
possible to add something like post installation scripts to finish the setup of 
applications that need more settings? Once again, if so, is there any 
documentation?

Since I did not find any answers to either question, (I know, I could have 
asked, then, but I wanted to see results, quickly), and not even the 
beginnings of a documentation of the internal workings of the installer, I 
decided to looks elsewhere. I opted for NSIS. It has lots of documentation / 
examples / tutorials, and while I was tempted to scratch my eyes out at some 
points in the process, NSIS quite simply allowed me to get started right away.

Once I had the NSIS installer working, I ran into another unexpected problem: 
There is this MSVC / MinGW issue. I understand this problem cannot be solved 
at its root, but is there really no better way of coping with this 
incompatibility? Right now (correct me, where I'm wrong):
- *all* kde packages (library or not) in the kde-win installer need to be 
compiled with both MinGW and MSVC.
- both versions are not co-installable (or at least not in the same 
directory).
For developers / packagers this means that you either need to specifically 
instruct users to install one particular flavour of KDE, or you need to provide 
both versions, even if:
- nothing links against your package
- you're already spending enough time compiling / packaging
- if you need to link against a third party C++-library that's only readily 
available in one flavour, you're out of luck.

I don't know the technical details, I'm sure you guys have already discussed 
this before, and most probably this just isn't as easy as it sounds, but: If 
you could find any way to co-install both MinGW and MSVC versions (of the 
libraries, only), and to do so automatically, without the user ever needing to 
worry about this, this would really make packaging third party KDE 
applications easier.

Ok, so much for my feedback / my questions. Thanks again, for your great work.

Regards
Thomas
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