Per-app MSI-based installers

[Aleix Pol]

On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 4:21 PM, Nicolás Alvarez <nicolas.alvarez at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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>:
>> > 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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>
>
> --
> Nicolás
>
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>

Maybe it would make sense to split the msi's by tier?

Aleix
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