[Development] Changes to Qt offering

[Konrad Rosenbaum]

On 2020-01-29 17:02, Volker Hilsheimer wrote:
> You obviously don’t trust that TQtC will treat the data the 
> online-installer either demands or requires with the appropriate 
> confidence. So, shouldn't you build Qt from sources? Your IP address 
> is PII, after all. Why did you trust that The Qt Company didn’t 
> collect personal data from you previously - just because you didn’t 
> have to enter your email address? 
There is quite a difference between an IP address and my mail address: 
the IP address gets assigned to someone else soon and you need a court 
order to get my name (at least in Germany). My mail address enables you 
to spam me.
>
>> This, and a lot of what TQC employees are saying on these changes, does sound like the famous sentence
>> from Don Mattrick about the Xbox One: "We have a product for people who aren't able to get some form of connectivity; it's called Xbox 360."
>>
>> Back to the topic, I have a Qt account, I do NOT want to use it to install Qt.
>> I am pretty sure we will have community provided offline, and even maybe online, installers soon enough.
>
> I wonder where all this love for the Qt installer comes from. I personally consider “sudo apt-get install -y qtcreator” or “brew install qt-creator” or “choco install qtcreator" to be vastly superior to using the installer UI, and very easily integrated in VM provisioning. Any energy spent on making sure that the versions we get from those package repos is up-to-date would be worth a lot more (to me) than building another installer.

I can only respond for myself: I don't love the installer, I find 
dpkg/apt/tar/zip much better myself, I merely tolerate the installer. 
But the fact is TQC does not provide Debian packages, so:

a) if I really care about Qt and want "official" + "choice" I use the 
installer.

b) If the installer puts an undue burden on me I'll settle for just 
"choice" as long as somebody else provides it.

c) If that fails I'll build myself.

d) And if this is too much of a bother for that package I'll skip 
"choice" as well and use whatever Debian is providing (most of the time 
I feel like this about GCC, various databases, Apache, etc.).

It is a question of convenience and the amount of "giving a damn"...


Konrad