[Development] Changes to Qt offering

[Tino Pyssysalo]

On 27.1.2020, 23.53, "Development on behalf of Thiago Macieira" <development-bounces at qt-project.org on behalf of thiago.macieira at intel.com> wrote:

    > On segunda-feira, 27 de janeiro de 2020 10:39:44 PST Elvis Stansvik wrote:
    > > So? I have an account because I want to contribute. Does not mean I
    > > want to log in to download (especially not from CI).
    >
    > The CI aspect is actually pretty relevant. Aside from Appveyor, most other CI 
    > systems with Windows support (like GitHub Actions) do not have Qt pre-
    > installed. What people do to test on Windows is to use recipes that download 
    > the pre-compiled binaries and unpack them.
    >
    > What does the Qt Company suggest software developers do?
    > 
    > (I know there's Conan, vcpkg, etc. I want the Qt Company's official answer)
    
Headless installation is important for many Qt users. In the current installer, it is also 
possible with scripting but we are making it even more straightforward with different 
command line options in the Qt Installer 4.0, which is the next major version. 

It is also possible to transfer the qtaccount.ini file to a CI machine, which removes the 
need for manual/interactive login. The qtaccount.ini just contains the hash of the password. 

Integrating the access control with package managers has resulted to be rather 
Large project and we decided to continue with the installer instead, even though 
we use vcpkg to enable CMake to build Qt 6 and conan to resolve Qt Marketplace 
source code dependencies. 

--
Tino Pyssysalo
Installer PO
The Qt Company