[Development] A deployment tool for Linux

[Jason H]

> 11.04.2019, 04:05, "Richard Weickelt" <richard at weickelt.de>:
> > On 10.04.2019 23:21, Marco Bubke wrote:
> >>  Sounds you want flatpak. ;-)
> >
> > All those run-time extracted application container formats might be nice
> > solutions for GUI applications which is apparently the main target of Qt.
> > But my observation is that they perform rather poorly when being used for
> > command line applications or a combination of both.
> 
> You can use static linking for command-line applications, or use AppImage
> where artifact is just a single executable file which could be put anywhere in $PATH

Doesn't static linking require a static Qt?

Last time I messed with this was 1 years ago on a windows system which was pretty easy. I would use depends.exe and make sure the dependencies were next to the binary. Since then I've been mainly doing mobile apps which have their own packages. But once in a while I'll whip up a program for automation. I've lucked out that these systems are large and not Pis with limited storage, so I can put all of Qt on and compile it there. That's easiest. It was easier to just install Qt and build it on that system.  

Minimally I would like something to produce an image suitable for and "/opt" install. That is to me to be a structure like:
project/
+ bin/
+ + a.out
+ libs/
+ + [list of libs, Qt | system]
+ etc/

Given a generic binary, I would assume there's a generic tool to do this already? Is there a [what is the] Qt value-add?

I tried linuxdeployqt and it made my head spin. It stats out: "You'll need to provide the basic structure of an AppDir which should look something like this:". To which I say "No" this should be done for me. QMake knows all the things. There is no value-add in a human doing it. It continues "Where your desktop file would look something like:" Again, no, generate one for me. If I need to adjust things, I'll do that after they are generated. Of this, the application icon is the only thing I might want to modify. The time to do all that setup is greater than installing Qt, checking out the source and building.