Per-app MSI-based installers

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Tuesday 01 July 2014 Jul 19:26:28 Nicolás Alvarez wrote:
> 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,

But honestly... Is that really large? In this day and age 100mb is not a lot of bytes to download. I share the instinctive recoil from having ten applications on my system that all have a copy of the same libraries, that all get security updates at different moments and all that... The Krita download is 120mb, which is fine, and could be cut down easily by cleaning out the unused icons in the oxygen iconset...

And if I've learned one thing from struggling with cross-platform packaging is that it's never worth it to go outside the platform's conventions, at least for applications meant for regular users. That means, no cygwin, macports, fink, homebrew, kde-win installer or emerge. It also means, on Windows, that an installer is complete and includes everything including the right msvc runtime. It means no daemons, no running of apps like kbuildsycoca that are alien to the platform. 

Sorry for being a broken record about this -- but any effort that has applications sharing library packages, applications depending on daemons like dbus, kded or separate binaries to create things like the sycoca, that effort is never going to reach the real masses on Windows or OSX.

-- 
Boudewijn Rempt
http://www.valdyas.org, http://www.krita.org, http://www.boudewijnrempt.nl