Per-app MSI-based installers

[Kevin Funk]

On Wednesday 02 July 2014 19:35:15 Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> 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.

+1 so much.

On Windows, users want to have a standalone installer for each application.

I think part of the misunderstanding is that the average Windows user (which 
we'd like to target) doesn't want to install the whole KDE experience on his 
desktop. There might be users who want to just have Kate on their machine, to 
have "a better" editor. Others want to have Okular as PDF viewer replacement 
and Gwenview as image viewer. But honestly, most users do not want to install 
the complete KDE workspace as such.

> 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.

Indeed. We definitely need single app installers, even it means data 
duplication / increased package size. But seriously, that's cheap nowadays and 
Windows users are used to big binary blobs. (Just reminds me of HP's printer 
driver installers, which are roughly about 200 MB...)

PS: Don't get me wrong. I wouldn't oppose a proper package manager for Windows 
either. I'd love to have one. But still, this is nothing for the average user.

At any rate, thanks a lot for driving this Nicolas, much appreciated!

/me would love to see a KDevelop installer at some point.

Cheers

-- 
Kevin Funk