[Development] Summary of renaming changes

[Tobias Hunger]

On 19.10.2012 19:26, Sune Vuorela wrote:
> no. it would be "if you compiled Qt yourself or if you downloaded the
> built editions from digia, write qmake to build things. if you gotten
> from your linux distribution write probably
> qmake5,

Developers tend to be computer savvy people, they should be able to 
figure out a path to a binary on their system. Windows devs certainly 
can... I hope you are not implying Linux devs are more stupid than 
windows devs;-)

If a distribution feels that it needs to provide a default Qt for newbie 
developers to use, then it can always install a symlink to 
/usr/lib/ia64-linux-gnu/qt5/bin/qmake into /usr/bin and be done with 
that. Somebody just wanting to get his feet wet with Qt programming
will not care too deeply about the exact Qt version anyway (most likely 
not even whether it is Qt 4 or 5).

> but maybe the distro chose some other naming scheme so it could
> also be qmake-qt5 or /usr/lib/ia64-linux-gnu/qt5/bin/qmake"

Distributions will always rename/move around/leave out binaries. That is 
a distribution's core competence;-) Seriously: Distros have widely 
differing setups that can influence packaging. Some support multiarch 
installations, some need to press their distro into a distribution 
medium of a certain size, others do not. Some have special licensing 
needs, some will use virtualization/containers to provide better 
security, etc. There is just no way upstream can not address all this.

So let's make sure Qt installs cleanly on Linux systems in an as 
self-contained way as possible. Ideally distro-provided Qts should feel 
similar to self-compiled Qts (or those from an SDK) and similar to Qts 
on other systems like windows and mac.

To me that seems to be to install the binaries into a place outside of 
$PATH. Maybe we could provide recommendations for symlinks to be put 
into $PATH, but that is all we should do IMHO.

Best Regards,
Tobias

-- 
Tobias Hunger, Senior Software Engineer - Digia, Qt
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