On Monday 07 April 2014 Apr 08:45:56 Andrius da Costa Ribas wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Sticking to the items pointed by Aleix, in my humble opinion:
> - We want KDE on Windows to keep being a distribution? Should it be a
> development platform or a site to download installers?
> *We are both a distribution (installer) and a development platform (emerge)
> and I think we should keep being both.

Well, KDE is a third thing: it's a framework for developing applications with. 
Emerge sort of works for that, but not as a basis for distribution 
applications. And for setting up a development environment, a cmakelist.txt 
with all the dependencies as externals works just as well for me.

The KDE installer distribution is kind of like cygwin and is so complicated 
that it will never reach a large audience. People want to download Krita, not 
KDE. And besides, because it contains all the stuff for all the kde 
applications, it's big and complicated.
 
So, if you want a KDE application to read a wide audience -- then neither the 
development platform (emerge) or the distribution (installer) are appropriate 
because they are far too complicated. The only thing you can give the average 
windows user is a setup.exe or msi installer. And because there are so many 
windows users and so many different kinds of windows installs, anything that is 
remotely complex will go wrong for an astonishing number of users. 

Which means that an msi:

* should contains all the dependencies, but carefully stripped down so it 
doesn't get too big -- no man pages, only the smallest set of Qt dll's, only 
the icons from the whole icon set that the app needs (and this is still a todo 
for me)
* that the result doesn't interfere with any other kde-based application (which 
means making sure .kde isn't used, for instance)
* make sure that no daemons run (because people with sensitive firewalls will 
complain)


-- 
Boudewijn Rempt
http://www.valdyas.org, http://www.krita.org, http://www.boudewijnrempt.nl

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