[Development] Configure command lines of official Qt releases

[Konstantin Tokarev]

04.06.2019, 17:01, "Volker Hilsheimer" <volker.hilsheimer at qt.io>:
>> 04.06.2019, 16:41, "Volker Hilsheimer" <volker.hilsheimer at qt.io>:
>>>> On 3 Jun 2019, at 20:15, Elvis Stansvik <elvstone at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Den mån 3 juni 2019 kl 20:04 skrev Elvis Stansvik <elvstone at gmail.com>:
>>>>> Hi Richard,
>>>>>
>>>>> I think this was asked on the interest list back in January [1].
>>>>>
>>>>> The answer is here:
>>>>>
>>>>> https://code.qt.io/cgit/qtsdk/qtsdk.git/tree/packaging-tools/bld_config
>>>>>
>>>>> I seem to remember some recent Qt developer thread about making these
>>>>> more accessible, but can't find it now.
>>>>
>>>> Found it, but I remembered somewhat wrong. I was thinking of this note
>>>> by Volker in the recent "A monologue about platforms in the Qt world"
>>>> thread [1]:
>>>>
>>>> "Why don’t we make the exact way of turning a clean Linux
>>>> distro-install into a "Qt reference configuration" available to
>>>> everyone else? The way build machines are provisioned in Coin is
>>>> rather opaque, even with some of the respective provisioning scripts
>>>> available in the qt5.git repo [1]. Having to document on a
>>>> (notoriously outdated) wiki how to set up things to build Qt from
>>>> source, when we have that knowledge literally codified somewhere for
>>>> Coin, doesn’t seem effective."
>>>>
>>>> So that was more about making the provisioning process for a
>>>> "reference" build machine more transparent.
>>>>
>>>> Elvis
>>>>
>>>> [1] https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2019-May/035773.html
>>>
>>> Since I’m being quoted, I might just as well use the opportunity to announce that I’ve just made the repo where I’ve been tinkinering on a solution to this problem for a while now public on the Qt gitlab instance, accompanied by a little blog post:
>>>
>>> https://blog.qt.io/blog/2019/06/04/introducing-minicoin/
>>
>> Can this project be used to test provisioning changes before submitting them to the "big" Coin,
>> or there may be behavior differences?
>>
>> Either way, nice job!
>
> Thanks!
>
> Testing provisioning scripts and making sure that they result in a working setup is definitely one of the use cases for minicoin. I found it very useful to be able to have a fast loop of “minicoin up/try to build stuff/minicoin destroy/improve script”, e.g when trying to build Qt for Android locally.
>
> There are however some key differences in the assumptions Coin and minicoin make; for example, Coin has a few helper scripts that are used to download version-pinned packages from a Qt-internal cache, which is the kind of stuff minicoin doesn’t care about, so scripts at this point don’t translate 1:1.
>
> But If you run “minicoin status” you see that a bunch of coin-* machines are defined, which will run the provisioning scripts from qt5.git/coin/provisioning. So there is some basic scaffolding, and perhaps stuff that lives in the qt5.git open source repo should be useful by anyone, even if they don’t run their code within The Qt Company network :)

I guess it won't be possible to obtain some OS images like Windows or macOS outside of The Qt Company network because of licensing issues, however it would be great to have at least Linux and Android.

BTW, what about supporting KVM? Unlike VirtualBox, it supports paravirtualized disk I/O which should make very positive impact on build times.

> Perhaps minicoin helps making those scripts more "general purpose” over time.



-- 
Regards,
Konstantin