[Development] Building additional components with Conan for Qt 6

[Iikka Eklund]

Hi all,

We would like to provide more flexibility to the Qt users via leveraging a package manager in addition to the traditional Qt Installer.
Delivering additional components in source code form utilizing a package manager allows releasing updates when needed,
not only as part of a new Qt release.

There is also a benefit of being able to have much more libraries to the users without increasing the complexity of the baseline Qt unnecessarily.
For the user it's more straightforward to pick up the component once in the Installer component page rather than selecting the same component separately to each target and Qt version.

To make it easier to leverage new package manager functionality Qt Installer starts providing conan(.exe) client (https://conan.io)
which can be used to build the additional libraries from source packages along with your CMake project.
Conan provides a way to a vast collection of packages (e.g. openssl, zlib, etc. in https://conan.io/center/) which can be further utilized in your project.

In Qt Installer there are two additional packages utilizing conan, qtnetworkauth and qtimageformats.

>From the Qt Installer you can install the conan(.exe) client

  *   Tools/Conan/conan(.exe)

It uses conan setting files specific to your Qt installation

  *   Tools/Conan/.conan/*

Profiles are installed to (per 6.x essentials binary package):

  *   Tools/Conan/.conan/profiles

When you install these source packages via Qt Installer the sources are exported to conan cache specific to your Qt Installation

  *   Tools/Conan/.conan/data

The conan tools and additional packages are under "Preview" category in the Qt 4.x Installer.
The build recipies of the additional packages rely on the presence of installed Qt 6.0 snapshot (Preview) binary package.

This is still in early phase so workarounds may be required and things need to be fixed but you can try it out now:
https://wiki.qt.io/Qt6_Add-on_src_package_build_using_Conan_package_manager

Iikka Eklund
Senior Software Engineer

The Qt Company
iikka.eklund at qt.io
http://qt.io<http://qt.io/>



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