[Development] Qt 5.4 Mingw-4.9.1 offline package

[Koehne Kai]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: development-bounces+kai.koehne=theqtcompany.com at qt-
> project.org [mailto:development-
> bounces+kai.koehne=theqtcompany.com at qt-project.org] On Behalf Of
> Cristian Adam
> Sent: Monday, January 05, 2015 11:14 AM
> To: development at qt-project.org
> Subject: [Development] Qt 5.4 Mingw-4.9.1 offline package
> 
> Hi,
> 
> 
> I've installed Qt 5.4 Mingw-4.9.1 (qt-opensource-windows-x86-
> mingw491_opengl-5.4.0.exe)
> and I've noticed that the Qt Creator bundled with it was compiled with MSVC
> 2010 and had its own version of Qt 5.4 MSVC 2010 DLLs (~100MB)
> 
> 
> What is the reason for this?

The reason is simple: It's much easier to package / test one Windows binary, instead of nine different ones (we right now provide nine different offline installers  for Windows).

In the online installer case you have to choose one anyway, so we settled also on one build for the offline installers.

> Is Mingw-GCC 4.9.1 that bad, that a MSVC 2010 build of Qt Creator was
> needed?

No it's not. There's  a problem though with gdb choking when trying to debug a 32 bit Qt Creator.

> qt-opensource-windows-x86-msvc2013_opengl-5.4.0.exe - 694MB
> qt-opensource-windows-x86-mingw491_opengl-5.4.0.exe - 852MB
> 
> 
> Mingw-GCC is known to produce bigger binaries, but there is no reason to
> bloat the
> installer, right?

Well, Qt Creator and Qt also do not always synchronize their releases. That is, sometimes the Qt version Qt Creator ships is not the same as the released Qt version.

In practice it really shouldn't matter to you with which exact Qt version / compiler Qt Creator is compiled, except if you want to build your own Qt Designer plugins: In this case you have to use a matching setup.

Regards

Kai