[Development] qmlbundle vs Qt Resource System

[Koehne Kai]

Hi,

I'm right now having a second look at the QML deployment story, specifically at qmlbundle ... and frankly speaking I'm not sure how it compares to the Qt Resource System (.qrc/rcc). qmlbundle is something that was added in Qt 5.0 already, but since the two developers working on it have moved on there's little information about it, except for the original commit https://codereview.qt-project.org/#change,23842 .

That's what I found out so far:
- both rcc and qmlbundle can be used to bundle resource files (.qml, .js, images ...)
- qrc resources can be stored in separate files (.rcc), or embedded into the executable. Qmlbundle files are always separate files (.bundle).
- rcc can optionally compress the content (on by default). 
- qrc/rcc is neatly integrated into qmake/cmake/qbs for the embedded case. There's no direct support for qmlbundle in any build system (yet).
- rcc always processes a .qrc file, while qmlbundle individually add / remove /update files to a bundle by passing them on the command line.
- qmlbundle has 'metalinks' that you can use e.g. store stripped / processed versions of individual files.
- Rcc has file aliases and location language selectors.
- qmlbundle is tightly integrated into QtDeclarative, e.g. a 'qmldir' file can actually be a bundle .


Does anyone know more about the design goals for qmlbundle, specifically why it wasn't built on top of .qrc/rcc? Are there plans (yet) on how to move on with it?

Regards

Kai

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   Kai Köhne, Senior Software Engineer - Digia, Qt
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