KDE for Windows: Installation made easy!
Ok, finally back at home. *Pheeew*.
Over the last days I played with the Nullsoft scriptable installer system (NSIS) which allows for creating comfortable installation routines based on a description file. It’s pretty scriptable and gives nice results. Together with Ralf Habakers recent efforts to port KDE to Win32 with MinGW, the GCC for Windows port, it looks like installing KDE 4 applications with Scons/bksys could be both pretty flexible for us and simple for the user (unlike developing on windows for developers without MSVC, but I will comment on that in a later article).
It seems like we could create a fairly generic script that would fit most applications that we can semi-automatically create RPMs for today. At least for SUSE, that’s pretty painless.
All a user would generally need is installing the KDE base package (compare to the “.NET framework” that many apps need on windows today). This would only be required once for any KDE-based application and the installer could even fetch the package automatically.
Even though packaging windows applications with NSIS looks odd to someone only trained to create tarballs and RPMs, it is a pretty flexible piece of software.
Just to make sure, that people does not may expect to much from a single person.
My recent effort is concentrated to the bksys build system, make it ready for MinGW, so that anyone else is able to start porting with the official supported QT4 version on windows.
What I can do on porting, we will see then. I hope, that there will be more talented win32 developers (as I am) doing the real hard porting work and lift KDE on a higher level as it already is Smiling
Regards
Ralf
I am using NSIS for using KDElibs3/Windows since 2003, e.g. download recent Kexi:
http://kexi.pl/wiki/index.php?title=Kexi_for_MS_Windows
NSIS is not something you all would love. It provides an assembly-like language, so you have to deal with error-prone R0..R9 registers, nothing like imperative statements.
Not sure where to go now for KDElibs4, maybe INNO Setup (which uses Pascal language)…
I guess you may already have your heart set on NSIS (which I haven’t used myself) but you may also like to check out Inno Setup. It’s scriptable, light, easy to work with and the source is also available.