[Development] Qt 6 co-installability with Qt 5

[Kai Köhne]

> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: Development <development-bounces at qt-project.org> Im Auftrag von
> Jyrki Yli-Nokari
> Gesendet: Dienstag, 16. Februar 2021 06:10
> An: development at qt-project.org
> Betreff: Re: [Development] Qt 6 co-installability with Qt 5
> 
> Thiago is right. Qt’s biggest problem is the barrier of entry. User facing tools
> must work as documented.

Well, let's just realize that, by renaming qmake to qmake6 everywhere (including in the documentation), we actually create some confusion for our existing users, too. Also, I think adding version numbers to the name of tools is just no good user experience, and creates unnecessary friction when switching between Qt versions.

To be honest, the whole discussion feels to me that we are being held hostage right now for the fraction of Linux users that cannot use update-alternatives (because they are not administrators). If having different names of tools is such a big problem, why wasn't this addressed by now in Linux itself?

And again, this is not something limited to Qt. Last time I checked, the executable to run Python 3 on Windows is python.exe, not python3.exe. On Debian at least it's python3. This hasn't blocked Python from being perceived as overall beginner friendly ...

So, I would stick to qmake as canonical name, also in the documentation. We can mention that it's sometimes called qmake6 on Linux. But forcing everyone to change their habit and scripts just for the sake of consistency with a fraction of the users that use a global installation on Linux, and do not use update-alternatives, is IMO not a good move.

My 2 cents,

Kai