Per-app MSI-based installers

[Jos Poortvliet]

On Wednesday 02 July 2014 00:33:03 Aleix Pol wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 12:26 AM, Nicolás Alvarez
> <nicolas.alvarez at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > 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 :)
> 
> Would it make sense then to have a Muon Discover version targeting windows?
> The bad part is that by installing it we'd be pulling half KDE+Frameworks,
> but from there it would be quite consistent.

If we want to bring our view of application management to windows (app 
stores) we should do it building on what is there: have our apps in 
Microsoft's app store. Not create ANOTHER app store... I think that that is 
just complicated.

The MSI solution seems far better and probably was a major thing that has 
been holding back KDE software adoption on Windows.

Just my few cents...

> Aleix
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