[Development] Does Qt need a unified, cross-platform app deployment for devices and desktops?

[Vladimir Minenko]

Hello all,

I just wanted to bring up for a discussion an enhancement which concerns not only BlackBerry 10 as a platform, but also other platforms Qt runs on as well.

We recently submitted the change https://codereview.qt-project.org/#change,75441 (still WIP) which allows a Qt developer on BB10 just to do "make deploy" on a random .pro file to get that project packaged and deployed in a BB10 device without any additional typing. BB10 has already a full integration for these steps Qt Creator. The above change targets to significantly simply steps required on the command line. This is not only for those who (still) use the command line, but also for a CI system which would be able to automatically create and deploy test apps and unit tests in a cross platform manner and without "insider hacks".

In the course of discussions on Gerrit wrt this change, there was a feedback that a unified cross-platform solution would be much better than a yet another deployment tool. No doubts, such a solution would be great in the future, and this is the reasons for this email. I just hope this does not block us making Qt on BB10 a comfortable development environment.

A quick run over available information feeds [1] shows that basically only Android and BB10 have a one-go deployment infrastructure for apps. Others are a kind of an independent task to get done in addition to application development without any cross-platform support from Qt.

So the question is if owners/maintainers of all platform see this need and we can agree targeting some unification done in a future Qt release.

[1]:

Mac desktop:
http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5.0/qtdoc/deployment-mac.html
iOS:
http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2013/03/05/qt-for-ios-preview/
Win desktop:
http://qt-project.org/forums/viewthread/25714
Win RT:
http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2013/06/14/introduction-to-windows-rt-frameworks/
Android:
http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2013/10/09/android-deployment-in-qt-5-2/
Linux:
http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5.0/qtdoc/deployment-x11.html
BlackBerry 10
http://qt-project.org/doc/qtcreator-3.0/creator-deployment-bb10.html


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