Per-app MSI-based installers

[Aleix Pol]

On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 12:26 AM, Nicolás Alvarez <nicolas.alvarez at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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 :)
>

Would it make sense then to have a Muon Discover version targeting windows?
The bad part is that by installing it we'd be pulling half KDE+Frameworks,
but from there it would be quite consistent.

Aleix
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