[Gpg4win-devel] Claws Mail's installer, moving away from GPG4Win

[Werner Koch]

On Sun, 11 Nov 2012 09:19, colin at colino.net said:

> True... Although with the Windows model of shipping every related dll
> etc., my installer still installs its own version of gnupg. 

That means we will soon run into problem due to having two - possible
different - GnuPG installations on the same machine.  Too bad.

> What we'd need then would be to have both installers agree on where to
> install so Claws can find gpgme dlls, but there would probably be
> difficulties on how to ship dlls needed by both.

FWIW: We had long mail and face to face discussion with KDE people and
other people doing Windows ports.  The only agreement we came to was the
need for an installer system - and they every group wanted to push their
own installer system(s).  That is of course a no-go.  Thus we kept
everything as it was and we are trying to avoid problems.  An important
thing there is that all applications need to know where for example
GnuPG is installed (use gpgconf) and that GnuPG may never change things
in an incompatible way.  We have no solution on how to handle DLLs
(e.g. gpgme, libgcrypt), though.  In the not so long term I would like
to switch to MIS - it is the native Windows package management system,
and thus we should use.  Coming up with our own system would take many
years: Based on what?  deb, rpm, guix, kde-foo, kde-bar?  I even doubt
that e will ever agree on a system - thus MSI is probably the only
choice left. At least it is something, people always ask for.  The
drawback is that we will need to have a Windows instance somewhere
running to host the stuff (WIX) which needs an installed Windows.

> What I would like to do in the long term is manage to build the
> official Gpg4win again, and at that point in time, take my

Pretty please.

> Claws-related work back to gpg4win as a different target ('make
> claws-mail-installer' or something). If that's welcomed by the GPG4win

Is there really a problem with installing gpgol and gpgex?  They are
quite small.  The larger Gtk+ libraries are anyway required by Pinentry
and GPA and are the reason why we think that Claws is a good thing to
have in Gpg4win.

> See the README file on how to add packages to the installer, but that's
> a process more involved than just building :)

The problem is that we used certain packages which are not anymore in
Debian (hyperlatex)and that Glib demands more tools on the build
platform. Except for the documentation stuff, I have no problems to
build gpg4win on my sort-of-Wheeze box.  


Salam-Shalom,

   Werner



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