Per-app MSI-based installers

[Nicolás Alvarez]

For everybody's knowledge :) I'm working on single-app KDE installers
based on Windows Installer (built with the WiX toolkit).

My plan is to have a .msi with KDE Frameworks, Qt, and other common
dependencies that all app needs, and another .msi for each app. Then
there will be a .exe installer for each app, which chains together the
deps and the app. The app package will be embedded inside the
installer .exe, while the dependencies will be downloaded on demand.

Why the download on demand? If I were to embed both .msi's inside the
installer executable, the installers would work offline, but they
would be large (50-100MB) for every app, and the user would be
downloading the same data multiple times. By downloading the deps
during installation, we get relatively small installers (app only)
that will only download a larger package if it's the first KDE app you
are installing.

To make the executable installers (bundles), I'm using the WiX Burn
tool. Its default user interface looks like this:
http://i.imgur.com/zokLHVe.png which is better than the typical setup
wizard, but it isn't the nicest thing ever either. It's possible to
change the UI by providing a theme XML file with the dialog layout
(it's like a Qt .ui), or also by providing custom code in a DLL. I
will investigate the DLL approach and see if I can make a UI in Qt
that way :)

The WiX code is available on kde:scratch/nalvarez/kde-wix.git.

Questions welcome :)

-- 
Nicolás