Distributing (third party) KDE apps as a bundle

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hi,

I have previously written about problems of deploying third party KDE apps on 
windows. In the RKWard project, we've recently started using a new approach on 
binary distributions, and we are quite happy with that so far. Our situation 
may be special to some degree in that RKWard is not (yet) in the kdewin-
installer, we can only offer MinGW-binaries, and we also depend on an 
installation of R. This means that until recently, installing RKWard was a 
rather cumbersome procedure.

What we do now is this: We simply install KDE (kdebase-apps; using the regular 
installer), R, and RKWard in a common root on the development system. We add 
an .lnk-file to the rkward binary. Then just zip it all up into a self-
extracting archive with 7zip. This brings the installation instructions down 
to:

1) Install to a directory of your choice
2) Copy the RKWard.lnk to your deskop

The download size is ~130MB, all inclusive, which is not exactly small, but 
quite acceptable. Of that ~100MB is kdebase-apps and dependencies.

Also, this is not only simple to install, but also easy to package. The most 
difficult part is gathering the sources for KDE for GPL version 2-compliance 
(§3), but for that we have a simple script to download the relevant source 
packages from winkde.org. I'm attaching that for reference, in case it is of 
interest.

I'm not sure whether anything can be learnt from this for distributing 
"official" KDE apps. But for third parties like us this is probably the easiest 
way to deploy a KDE app on windows.

Regards
Thomas
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