[Development] Why custom installer on Mac, why not using @rpath?

[Dominik Holland]

On 06/17/2013 06:38 PM, Adam Strzelecki wrote:
> Hello,
>
> This may be a silly question, but why Qt5 is not using Mac native installer packages anymore, but own (unusual on Mac) installer application?
>
> Before in Qt4 there was .pkg installer, that was simply putting Qt frameworks into /Library/Frameworks and rest of the stuff into /Developer. Which is IMHO something that is pretty expected by Mac developer. Of course this could make problem for Qt4 & Qt5 coexests, that's why it is possible to enable specifying different installation target in installer .pkg.

The old installers installed to /Developer because it was the way to 
work back in XCode 3 days (i'm not sure with the version number). The 
new XCode versions are now installed as normal versions and /Developer 
shouldn't be used anymore.

>
> Once of the reasons I can see there's new "qt5.patcher" installer task that simply rewrites all referenced Qt frameworks to their paths using "install_name_tool". This solves the problem when referencing framework, but this is awkward solution.
>
> Why not use @rpath? And make all Qt frameworks to use id of @rpath/QtNAME/Versions/VERSION/NAME, i.e. @rpath/QtCore/Versions/5/QtCore

I already tried that for my own applications which comes with own Qt 
Libraries. The problem is, that this works for quite well for the normal 
Libraries but that didn't worked for me for the plugins which are loaded 
at run-time.

Dominik