Quoting "Aaron J. Seigo" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Hello Hamed ... > > On Thursday 21 August 2008, you wrote: >> Is (or will be) there any MSI installer for kde4 on windows? > > I really don't know, but I'm CC'ing the kde-windows team because > they probably > *do* know ;)
This is something I'd like to see. There was some chatting about this at aKademy and I was reading more about side-by-side assemblies before writing but here comes a "mind --dump". Not MSI installers necessarily, but standalone application installers which only contain the application binaries and, maybe, some specific dependencies. I think what we should do is have redistributable kdelibs, kdepimlibs, etc binary packages mimicking the Visual C++ Redistributable Packages Microsoft makes available for Visual C++. Using side-by-side assemblies (SxS, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa376307.aspx ), these libraries would be shared by all KDE applications and thanks to the versioning capabilities SxS provides, it would even be possible to have KDE 4.1 and KDE 4.2 applications (for instance, Parley from 4.2 and Kate for 4.1) without kdelibs 4.1 and 4.2 clashing. How would this work (at least in my mind :-) ? You would only download an application and the installer (NSIS, MSI or whatever it uses) would look for the libraries it needs. Take, for instance, KWord. The KWord installer would only contain the KWord binaries and 3rd party dependencies specific to KWord. When the installer is started, it would look for KDElibs 4.1 (or 4.2, I don't know then KWord plans to release) and KOfficeLibs 2.0. If KDElibs 4.1 and/or KOfficeLibs 2.0 are not found, it would tell you it needs the "KDElibs 4.1 redistributable package", exactly the same way applications compiled with Visual C++ 2005 and 2008 do now if you are on Windows 2000 or XP. It could even offer you to download and install the package for you. This "KDElibs 4.1 redistributable package" would then contain KDElibs 4.1 and its 3rd party dependencies. My point is the current installer works very well because it resolves dependencies and installs everything but it's not what a Windows user is used to and IIRC, offline installations need you to essentially mirror the WinKDE repository and tell the WinKDE installer where the mirror is (not exactly intuitive for the average Windows user). Summarizing, what I propose is: * Have redistributable packages for kdelibs, kdepimlibs and kofficelibs, each one of them including its third-party dependencies * Use side-by-side assemblies and make kdelibs, kdepimlibs and kofficelibs be shared assemblies * Standalone installers for applications, including the application and the 3rd party dependencies specific to that application Comments? -- Pau Garcia i Quiles http://www.elpauer.org (Due to my workload, I may need 10 days to answer) _______________________________________________ Kde-windows mailing list [email protected] https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-windows
