Amarok Blog

No, I'm not announcing them, I'm explaining what is involved and why it's not just a matter of "throw up a zip file on a server".

Using things like kdelibs and ruby in Amarok is great: you get a lot of functionality that you don't need to develop yourself. On Linux someone else takes care of packaging it all up for you too, and since many programs use them, Amarok itself doesn't really pay the cost.

On Windows it's a bit different. From a quick test I did, a Visual Studio release build with the non-runtime stuff stripped away (debug libraries, linker files, header files, etc) comes out at around 270mb 200mb. Compressed with 7zip it's a more reasonable 70mb, but it's still a fair bit of data to be pushing around if we're going to be doing a reasonably frequent alpha and beta release schedule. A lot of that is stuff Amarok doesn't need (eg base KDE programs and graphics), but stripping that out becomes pretty tricky, and I'm not sure we'd want to.

The good news is Amarok by itself itself comes out to only 2.35mb compressed: so assuming that KDE on Windows reaches a stable(-ish) point in the near future, putting up builds of just Amarok itself will be quite reasonable.

Packaging it up is also an issue. If we use the kde windows installer builds, then it causes me two problems: firstly that the release schedule might not be convenient for Amarok, and secondly that the compilers it supports are mingw and Visual Studio 2005. I'm primarily using Visual Studio 2008, and so I can't compile against the binaries from the installer. In theory I could release mingw builds, but at this stage the Visual Studio builds are smaller, faster and (at least for Amarok) better tested.

On the other hand, doing manual packaging means that Amarok wont be in sync with the rest of the kde stuff and that could cause issues if people want to use other KDE programs. Nobody really wants to contend with kde on Windows having a separate distribution for each program.

At the moment Amarok isn't far enough along that it's worth dealing with these issues. I'd rather spend energy on making it worth using than dealing with packaging and installation nightmares. Yay for Linux where someone else deals with that crap for you!

Update:

Some of my figures were wrong, it's "only" about 200mb in total.

A breakdown of where the space is going (in kb)

12488 amarok
75559 kdebase
33109 kdelibs
5155 kdepimlibs
134 kdewin32
158 qimageblitz
42188 qt
16984 ruby
1354 soprano
1336 strigi
352 taglib
21283 win32libs

In theory, at least some of the qt, kdelibs and kdepimlibs, and most of kdebase can be trimmed, with varying degrees of pain. Getting it down to maybe 120mb installed and a 35mb download would probably be the limit of what is easily achieved. Of course, as mentioned above, then you'd be left with a half broken KDE install that would probably screw up any other KDE app you attempted to install. I know some people wont care about any KDE apps other than Amarok, but for those who do, to break them would be really bad form.

Update 2:

I've started a thread on the kde-windows mailing list to see if we can work out how we're going to handle packaging and releasing KDE apps on Windows. Hopefully we can work something out. As I mentioned, we have an downloader/installer/packager app already, but it needs more work before it's ready to handle non-developer use.

Unfortunately KDE on Windows is still a fairly small project, and it's a bit of a catch 22: need more people to push it towards release, need a release to get people interested and involved.

As far as download size goes, a lot of it is about perception. The first impression you get of an application is how big the download is. I don't want Amarok coming off as "bloatware". Although I may know that the download includes mostly KDE related stuff that isn't Amarok (heck, you get a file manager, web browser, etc), a new user wouldn't and would just think "this is even more bloated than iTunes". Perhaps the best way to do this is getting interest in other KDE apps on Windows, so people can see they're getting a package that lets them download and run a whole lot of useful stuff. Again, it's a pity we don't have the manpower at the moment to do it.