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

[Frederik Gladhorn]

Fredag 24. januar 2014 10.25.38 skrev 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.

I think this would be very sensible. There are ideas to unify the deployqt 
tools for at least android and ios, but I would like this to go further for 
other platforms as well.

In fact I'd think it would be great if we could reach a state where we have 
integration with the installer framework and running make deploy (or make 
installer or whatever) gives you a setup.exe on windows for example.

Greetings,
Frederik


> 
> [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-framewor
> ks/ 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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-- 
Best regards,
Frederik Gladhorn
Senior Software Engineer - Digia, Qt
Visit us on: http://qt.digia.com