[Development] Result of the tool renaming & wrapper discussion

[Thiago Macieira]

Last week in Berlin, Ossi, some others and I finally got together and hashed 
out what remained to be discussed. We concluded the following for the co-
installation of tools:

Principle: Qt installs by themselves do not support co-installation of any 
binaries to the same prefix's bindir. Instead, we'll provide a wrapper.

Decisions:
1) no Qt dependency for the wrapper, just pure C++
  Rationale: this tool is required for building any Qt 4 or 5 application, so 
it cannot depend on any one single Qt version as it would unacceptably 
increase the build time for applications depending on another version.

2) this tool will live in a separate repository, not qtbase
  same rationale

3) this tool's buildsystem (a handwritten Makefile) will create the symlinks
This list will be exhaustive: it needs to include EVERY BINARY in Qt 3, 4 or 
5. Whenever you add a new binary, you need to update the tool.

4) we will have a libexec dir, for programs that are never wrapped
  Rationale: binaries like QtWebProcess are very specific and are never run by 
users.

5) aside from the pure libexec executables (see #4), everything goes to 
$bindir
  Rationale: this was simplest, with least modifications required and least 
risk.
Therefore, there will be no QT_INSTALL_APPS. All binaries are therefore 
declared build-specific. Any form of sharing binaries like moc or uic between 
Qt installations is unsupported by the Qt Project.

6) the $bindir defaults to $prefix/bin
  Rationale: the default installation is actually *not* co-installable. 
Distros seeking co-installability need to pass -bindir to configure. Corollary: 
we need to write a wiki page with instructions for packagers.

7) no attempt to solve multiarch building

8) the tool has independent release schedule and is *not* as part of Qt 5

I was planning on working on the tool this week, but as it turns out, it's 
late Tuesday already and I haven't got started. This is a short week in the US 
as Thanksgiving is coming and I will travel again next week.

We need it done before the RC so that packagers can actually make it work. But 
we can work on RC packages before the tool is ready.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center
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