The future of KDE Development on Windows

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Monday 07 April 2014 Apr 08:45:56 Andrius da Costa Ribas wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Sticking to the items pointed by Aleix, in my humble opinion:
> - We want KDE on Windows to keep being a distribution? Should it be a
> development platform or a site to download installers?
> *We are both a distribution (installer) and a development platform (emerge)
> and I think we should keep being both.

Well, KDE is a third thing: it's a framework for developing applications with. Emerge sort of works for that, but not as a basis for distribution applications. And for setting up a development environment, a cmakelist.txt with all the dependencies as externals works just as well for me.

The KDE installer distribution is kind of like cygwin and is so complicated that it will never reach a large audience. People want to download Krita, not KDE. And besides, because it contains all the stuff for all the kde applications, it's big and complicated.
 
So, if you want a KDE application to read a wide audience -- then neither the development platform (emerge) or the distribution (installer) are appropriate because they are far too complicated. The only thing you can give the average windows user is a setup.exe or msi installer. And because there are so many windows users and so many different kinds of windows installs, anything that is remotely complex will go wrong for an astonishing number of users. 

Which means that an msi:

* should contains all the dependencies, but carefully stripped down so it doesn't get too big -- no man pages, only the smallest set of Qt dll's, only the icons from the whole icon set that the app needs (and this is still a todo for me)
* that the result doesn't interfere with any other kde-based application (which means making sure .kde isn't used, for instance)
* make sure that no daemons run (because people with sensitive firewalls will complain)


-- 
Boudewijn Rempt
http://www.valdyas.org, http://www.krita.org, http://www.boudewijnrempt.nl