[Development] Summary of renaming changes

[Alberto Mardegan]

On 10/19/2012 10:31 AM, Knoll Lars wrote:
> Unfortunately qmake is bound to the Qt version and not backwards compatible. So if we want to make it possible to co-install Qt 5 with Qt 4, we have very little choice but to rename it.

This is not entirely true. Surely at any given time /usr/bin/qmake must
be either the Qt4 or the Qt5 qmake, but this doesn't mean that qmake
needs to be renamed.

It's perfectly possible to install the unrenamed qmake tool in different
directories, like for instance:
/opt/Qt4/bin/qmake
/opt/Qt5/bin/qmake

Then distributors could choose their preferred way to make these tools
reachable by a user, by a variety of means:

1) Provide symlinks:
   /usr/bin/qmake -> /opt/Qt4/bin/qmake
   /usr/bin/qmake5 -> /opt/Qt5/bin/qmake

2) Provide nothing, just let the user setup his PATH manually.

3) Provide a script to switch, per user and maybe even per $PWD, what
version of Qt /usr/bin/qmake should generate the makefiles for.

I'm not suggesting anything new, all these options have been suggested
by other people before and I'm just summarizing them (sorry for not
remembering who proposed them).

Option 1) is very similar, from an application developer point of view,
to Thiago's proposal, but it leaves the final choice to distributors.

Ciao,
  Alberto

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