Distributing (third party) KDE apps as a bundle

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hi,

Laurent Espitallier schrieb:
> I don't know very much about KDE on Windows packaging process but if 
> needed, well explained and of course if it can help, I think I could 
> write NSIS script templates to download files / install or unpack 
> binaries / add shortcuts, etc.

speaking only for RKWard, here, I'd say many thanks for the offer, but I 
think we don't have much use for this, ATM. We are quite happy with our 
installation procedure, now, and adding another layer around this only 
for adding a shortcuts, automatically, seems like overkill to me.

One thing that I could imagine to be useful in general would be an NSIS 
template that
1) autodetects / asks for an existing KDE installation to install an app to
2) checks certain parameters of that installation (minimum version, 
compiler flavor, possibly presence of specific apps / libraries), and
3) offers to create a new KDE installation (or update an existing one), 
fully automatically, if no suitable installation exists.

However, judging from my experience with NSIS, this is not going to be 
too easy. And I think there may be much easier ways to cover the most 
common use case(s). So what are the most common deployment scenarios?

1) A KDE enthusiast wants to "have KDE" on windows, that is all 
available applications, or at least a sizeable bunch of KDE apps.
2a) A "regular" user wants to install one particular application on 
windows. That application happens to be based on KDE.
2b) The same user wants to install one or more further KDE applications, 
later.

I would guess that 2b is least common, followed by 1, and 2a is the most 
common scenario today. Possibly I'm underestimating the importance of 1, 
but also, that is already covered by the kdewin-installer, nicely. So, 
is there any way to make 2a easier?

Well, if a basic KDE installation (say kdebase-apps, kdepimlibs, and 
dependencies; that should cover most applications needs) would be 
available, centrally, as a single-download binary bundle it would be a 
lot easier for us (RKWard) and others to simply distribute their KDE 
based apps as an easy to use installation bundle. Of course this does 
not make too much sense unless and until other projects / people are 
actually interested in using this. So - would this sound interesting to 
anybody else?

Regards
Thomas