[Development] Removing libudev dependency from binary packages?

[Koehne Kai]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: development-bounces+kai.koehne=digia.com at qt-project.org
> 
> [...]
> After this, my opinion is that the preferred way to go should be to think more
> in native package system for Linux. For example, Clang is shipping nightly
> builds through the package system: http://llvm.org/apt/ (ok, this are deb
> packages only, but the OBS provides several types of binaries for many
> distributions)
>
> I don't know if it should be done downstream, or as additional binaries to
> what distributions offer. All I can say is that in the next months I'm going to
> need binaries of Qt 5.2 that work on Debian stable. Since that's not going to
> be provided by official repositories, I would prefer if the work is not wasted
> just for my own use case, so I will knock doors to see if somebody else is
> interested, or I can share the work with Debian packagers.

Actually by now a lot of popular distributions provide pretty recent Qt packages (e.g. both Fedora 20 and OpenSUSE 12.3 ship 5.1.1), so I assume a lot of Qt developers are using these. Maybe we could even advertise a bit more on the qt pages ...

Anyhow, we're having the binary installer because
 - we need a way to distribute packages for the enterprise version
 - we want to provide packages also for beta releases etc
 - some people are (forced to) use older versions of their distributions, or like you very conservative distributions like debian
 - some people want to provide binaries for different Linux distributions/versions themselves
 - we can use essentially the same infrastructure both for Mac, Windows, and Linux, which helps a lot

But I agree that, with the increasing scope of Qt and requirements being added, it got more and more difficult to provide versatile & useful packages for Qt running on a whole lot of distributions. So, it would be great if you or someone else could look into e.g. setting up stuff in obs, and see how far they can get. 

Regards

Kai