[Development] New proposal for the tool naming

[Ziller Eike]

On 23 Oct 2012, at 19:03, Thiago Macieira <thiago.macieira at intel.com>
 wrote:

> On terça-feira, 23 de outubro de 2012 16.33.05, Ziller Eike wrote:
>>>> So that if you happen to have a "real" qmake instead of the wrapper in
>>>> the
>>>> PATH on linux, you don't realize that when you are doing "qmake -qt5" to
>>>> force "most current qt5 version" (or whatever the semantics would be),
>>>> you
>>>> actually execute a completely different qmake? I don't think that would
>>>> be
>>>> a good idea.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> It will do that too if it's in a separate build looking at a non-standard 
>>> configuration path.
>> 
>> I don't get what you mean with that.
> 
> Er... convoluted way of saying that if you only have one Qt build visible from 
> the wrapper, "qmake -qt5" can mean exactly one Qt build. Therefore, by 
> exclusion of any other alternatives, it's the most recent build available :-)
> 
> In any case, "-qt5" may not mean "latest", but simply "default 5.x version". 
> The implementation will decide what that means.

"qmake -qt5" would *not* mean "default" or "latest" (whatever the implementation will decide), if there is a specific version of qmake in the PATH, instead of the wrapper. From a usability standpoint it would be much safer to bail out with an error if you use "qmake -qtXYZ" on a specific version of qmake instead of the wrapper, because it wouldn't do what you'd expect it to do.

>>> That's mostly what's going to happen on Windows anyway, 
>>> isn't it?
>> 
>> My concerns are about having -qt5 ignored for the "real" qmake on linux. On
>> Windows and Mac the -qt option is useless anyhow (which makes it
>> questionable to use it there IMO, so it makes it questionable to use it in
>> the documentation that way too IMO)
>> 
>> I think all this becomes much too confusing.
> 
> If the option is required in one platform and does not cause anything but a 
> minor inconvenience on others, why not document it?

Because you wouldn't be able to use -qt4 or -qt=5.0.1. You don't want to just document it (as in "qmake (the wrapper on Linux) also takes the -qt[=version] option"), but want to use it everywhere in the documentation where qmake is called. That creates expectations about how qmake works, though it is just referring to how the qmake wrapper on Linux works.

-- 
Eike Ziller, Senior Software Engineer - Digia, Qt
 
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