Per-app MSI-based installers

[John Layt]

On 3 July 2014 12:37, Jaroslaw Staniek <staniek at kde.org> wrote:

> KDE on Windows (as a project) was not meant to transform Windows to an OS
> with full KDE experience. Such distracting task would be against our "FOSS
> business model", our reply would be better "want full experience, use an
> open OS".

Fully agree, KDE on Windows/Mac/Android is about the applications
only, both as a demo of how good FOSS can be to entice people over,
but mostly as giving those users freedom from proprietary apps on
those platforms.  We should fit into those platforms and provide a
decent feature set, but we should still save our best stuff for free
OSs.

> please note, Windows (and Mac) apps typically do not have all these icons on
> buttons. Love icons? Use them on Linux platforms :) Or enable them on
> Windows/Mac but this shall not be a default IMHO.

> - infra: no KIO (when statistically nobody is asking for that), no ksycoca,
> no dbus, no a copy of settings in system-settings, no alien tech on
> platforms that have these features out of their scope or have own (perhaps
> more naive but built-in) equivalents

I've started a wiki page for this sort of stuff, see
https://community.kde.org/KDE_Applications/Cross_Platform_Issues,
please add any other such items here and we can try find common
solutions.

ksycoca - haven't we got rid of that in KF5?

> Auto-updates of any way is a plus.

It's needed on Win and Mac, but if we go the monolithic offline
installer then the update option is simply to notify the user to
download a new installer and replace the old app.  Auto-updates tend
to need online modes and dependency resolution to download the bits to
update?

> Translations installable/discoverable in the context of apps.

Yes, have a menu option for "Download more languages" which works via
GHNS, but that's not much use if you don't speak English and on the
first run you see your UI in English and can't find that menu option.
That means the installer either must include all languages, or we have
separate installers for each language (or language group), or we
dynamically download the translation in the installer.

> Look, Android/iOS packages are largely all-in-one blobs on so less
> performant machines than desktops and nearly nobody complaints too much IF
> the app in question is worth pulling 10's of MB.

Most Android/iOS apps can be all-in-one blobs because they use native
libraries and so are smaller, but it is a problem for us, both if
users see us taking up too much space and so delete apps, and for
attracting devs who think they'll lose users if they take too much
space.  That's a real problem for Qt itself.

> I'm saying to myself, start
> with value first, then perform 2nd-level optimizations later. Removing
> unnecessary bits of resources, disabling unused modules or making them
> optional - this all is a 2nd-level nice-to-have stuff.

Agreed that it's a ongoing process of progressive improvements, but if
you know where you're heading at the start then it's usually less work
along the way :-)

Cheers!

John.