Per-app MSI-based installers

[Aleix Pol]

On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 12:10 PM, Jos Poortvliet <jospoortvliet at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Wednesday 02 July 2014 00:33:03 Aleix Pol wrote:
> > 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.
>
> If we want to bring our view of application management to windows (app
> stores) we should do it building on what is there: have our apps in
> Microsoft's app store. Not create ANOTHER app store... I think that that is
> just complicated.
>
> The MSI solution seems far better and probably was a major thing that has
> been holding back KDE software adoption on Windows.
>
> Just my few cents...
>
> > Aleix
>

I agree, I was just thinking out loud I guess.

So is it feasible to get those packages in the Windows Store?

Aleix
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