Per-app MSI-based installers

[Cristian Oneț]

Hi,

I really like the idea, the biggest improvement I expect from using
frameworks is to reduce the size of the installed application. It
would be nice if the installer would have a list of runtime
dependencies and would be able to bring only those dependencies.

Another part that needs special handling are translations and
documentation. It should be easy for the user to install only the
translations that he needs. The documentation should be optional (it's
available online).

Looking forward to seeing this in action.

Regards,
Cristian

2014-07-02 1:26 GMT+03:00 Nicolás Alvarez <nicolas.alvarez at gmail.com>:
> 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
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