[Development] Qt 5.9 prebuild binary packages( was: Re: Qt 5.9)

[Andrew Knight]

Hi,


On 12/22/16 09:18, Oliver Wolff wrote:
> Can someone elaborate on how "one package per OS" reduces the testing
> burden significantly? We still have to check every
> platform/configuration that is inside the package. All that changes is
> that the testers install from one big package instead of smaller
> packages. I doubt that one person will check the whole windows package
> (for example). At least I will not volunteer to do that :X

I agree. If your goal is to have fewer people testing, combine the
installers. Then, people who don't have the time/bandwidth/disk space
for several 3.3GB snapshots will simply not test the packages.

As as a *former* Windows user, I may be out of sync with developer
expectations. Even so, I imagine you would be hard-pressed to find many
developers who use all of the ABIs listed in that hypothetical Windows
installer. I guess this will push those users to use the online
installer, which is probably what is desired...

I still have to deal with CI systems which download and install Qt
automatically, and they are especially sensitive to the
download/installation size issue. Until either installer provides a
supported way to script the installation (I've been using [0]), then
bloating the offline installer gets a -1 from me.

>
>
> On 21/12/2016 19:37, Jake Petroules wrote:
>> LET'S DO IT! And thank you for following through on this idea.
>>
>> This will reduce our package testing burden significantly which is
>> very important because it lowers the barrier to entry for us to
>> actually add new platforms/installers. For example, adding tvOS to
>> the combined macOS/iOS/Android package would be valuable.

This one sounds reasonable.

>>
>> I would omit the host architectures (it provides no useful value
>> since there are multiple host architectures in some cases) and target
>> platforms from the filenames, though (like -android, -qnx,
>> -android-ios), because they aren't there for the Windows package so
>> it would be more consistent. The download descriptions should detail
>> what each package contains.

Agreed.

>>
>> Also, can we simply subsume the QNX packages into the base enterprise
>> packages? i.e. combine qt-enterprise-linux-x64-android and
>> qt-enterprise-linux-x64-qnx? Or is there a licensing-related issue
>> around that? And why do we need different packages based on the
>> license, anyways?

I assume the enterprise components haven't been properly "sanitized" so
that they can be disabled for the open-source distribution. Combining
the installers certainly makes the most sense, and was something
promised already at last year's QtWS IIRC.


[0] https://github.com/benlau/qtci/blob/master/bin/extract-qt-installer

--
Andrew