[Development] Qt installer capabilities (was: Re: Changes to Qt offering)

[André Somers]

Hi,

On 28/01/2020 12:52, Tino Pyssysalo wrote:
>
> 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.

Thanks.

While on the topic of the installer and using a qtaccount.ini file: will 
it finally become possible to use the online installer to install 
commercial Qt versions? I would find it a huge improvement were I able 
to maintain my Qt installations from one installer instead of having to 
manage every version separately with offline installers.

André