[rkward-devel] static windows binary

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hi,

On Wednesday 05 May 2010, meik michalke wrote:
> now that i've toyed around with the windows version a little (nice to see
>  that rkward can be run from a network share and even a DVD without
>  installation), i was wondering if a static build was possible.
> 
> the needed kdebase installation consumes around 700 MB of disk space, and i
> doubt that rkward uses all of the installed tools and libs. if a static
>  build could save a significant amount of that space, i'd prefer to have
>  such an option.

a static build is next to impossible. Some libraries are actually loaded 
during runtime on demand (the katepart, khtmlpart, and filebrowser 
implementations), and these are dynamically linked to other libraries as well, 
so a static build just will not work out.

Of course there is a bunch of stuff in a kdebase installation that we really 
don't need, but I'm afraid, sorting out just what is or is not needed is not 
trivial. On the other hand, even just sorting out the wallpapers 
(KDE/share/wallpapers) would save quite a bit of space, so trimming the 
installation down to fit on a CD-ROM is probably quite possible.

> well, i'm not using windows anyways, but it's hard to convice someone to
>  give rkward a try if that means to install so much otherwise unneeded
>  stuff. apart from that, of KDE could be stripped down to the really needed
>  parts, rkward could easily be burnt as a live CD for windows users.
> 
> how do you feel about this?

Well a live CD would be pretty cool. However I think the most exciting option 
is to simply provide a self-extracting archive that contains a complete 
installation of RKWard, kdebase, and R (with R2HTML, and perhaps some others 
pre-installed). This should be rather easy to create and maintain, and (taking 
my somewhat atypical installation as a reference) I think this would be 
somewhere around 200-250MB for the download.

Not exactly light-weight, but probably only a moderate scare-off, these days. 
Also, that would really make the installation pretty much as easy as possible: 
Double-click and select the directory to install to. So I think we should 
really give that a shot, soon.

There are some small caveats:
- Placing an icon on the desktop would be nice, but not sure, if this can 
easily be integrated in the self-extractor.
- AFAIK, kdelibs/base includes some strong cryptography support. Nowadays 
sourceforge keeps an eye on this (US legislation), and asks projects to state 
whether they provide crypto for download. If we do, access from certain 
countries to all project pages would be firewalled. OTOH, sourceforge recently 
announced, that they also provide project-independent hosting of single 
download files, now. I have not looked into that, yet, but we could probably 
use that service (and linking the file from our download page should still be 
ok).
- Any volunteers for doing this?

Regards
Thomas
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