Per-app MSI-based installers

[Nicolás Alvarez]

Downloading only the required dependencies is possible, but I'd
rather avoid making too fine-grained packages, like one .msi per framework.
I think there are performance problems (slow installation) if I split
things into a hundred small .msi's, and we wouldn't gain much, as there are
some things that most apps will need anyway.

We could do some coarser splitting though, such as making a separate
package for QtDeclarative *and* the related framework bits, or a package
for QtWebKit, since not all apps use those and they are relatively large
compared to individual frameworks.

Note also that oxygen-icons by itself is 35MB, which is larger than the
package with all the libraries (at least so far; I'm still growing it).


El miércoles, 2 de julio de 2014, Cristian Oneț <onet.cristian at gmail.com>
escribió:

> 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
> <javascript:;>>:
> > 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
> > _______________________________________________
> > Kde-windows mailing list
> > Kde-windows at kde.org <javascript:;>
> > https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-windows
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-- 
Nicolás
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