[Interest] Nokia SDK vs. Qt Commercial SDK

Konrad Rosenbaum konrad at silmor.de
Thu Jun 14 10:06:43 CEST 2012


Hi,

On Wednesday 13 June 2012 21:33:02 David Ching wrote:
> A couple days ago Turunen Tuukka from Digia responded to my question here
> about getting an SDK with Qt 4.8.2 in it by saying
> 
> > There is no Qt Project SDK for 4.8 -
> > just the Nokia SDK and Qt Commercial SDK.

At the moment this is true. Eventually the Qt project will have its own 
"official" SDK. Whether Nokia will still package its own SDK to take care of 
its Symbian and N9 phones remains to be seen.

> Does this mean there are two official SDK's now, and the commercial one is
> different (i.e. with more bug fixes)?  Where is this discussed, where do I
> learn about and get both?  I must say, the state of what is available with
> Qt is as obscure as it was when Trolltech sold licenses to it and everyone
> had a different license price!  I must be missing where such fundamental
> info is discussed.

> I admit I have been lost about the state and direction of Qt ever since I
> heard the term "Open Governance."  Could someone summarize what to expect?

Let's see whether a little rehash helps:

Open Governance means that Qt is now a typical Open Source project. With a 
community of developers who write the code and make the actual decisions for 
the mainline project. Digia took over the commercial part of Qt, since they 
are a major consulting company they are quite well-suited to cater for the 
commercial customers.

Since it only really started about a year ago (although it was in the making 
for quite some time) you can't expect it to work flawlessly yet.

So the current situation is like this:

The Qt project (www.qt-project.org) is the official community project and 
makes the official sources available for download. You can find all the 
components of the SDK here and build them yourself.

If someone volunteers to do it the project will have an "official binary 
release" of the full SDK. Until then: feel free to build yourself or to use 
one of the "forks".

Nokia releases its own version of the SDK to make it easier for their target 
audience (phone developers). It may contain patches that help with phones and 
it may be a version of Qt and QtCreator that Nokia thinks is better for phones 
(e.g. if they believe 4.8.2 is not a good release for them, they'll skip it) - 
you'll have to ask Nokia or download their version of the sources and do a 
diff.

Digia releases a commercial version of the SDK to commercial developers. Since 
Digia and the Qt project are not the same entity they are driven by different 
objectives and will have different patches. Digia will include the patches 
they believe their customers want, the Qt project will include the patches 
that the project approvers and maintainers think will fix the problems best. 
Most Digia patches will eventually end up in mainline Qt and vice versa, but 
there will be some delay in both directions.

You can bribe, oops - I mean "pay", Digia to include your favorite patch in 
their commercial distribution - I even suspect you can pay them to submit 
patches to the mainline faster. Or you can write a patch yourself and submit 
it to the Qt project for inclusion. Or .... Whatever works best for you.

Linux distributors will package some version of mainline Qt, add patches to 
make it work on that distribution and stay with that minor release during the 
lifetime of this version of the distribution. The version of QtCreator 
shipping with that distribution will usually be configured to recognize the 
packaged version of Qt.


So which version you use really depends on what you want to accomplish:

To be on the forefront of Qt development: use sources and compile them 
yourself. Depending on your risk-tolerance use a release or GIT.

To be compatible with Linux distributions: use the version shipped by the 
distributor. No experiments please.

If you are a commercial developer who needs and wants lots of support from 
Digia: use their version, the one they know best how to support.

If you are a commercial developer who uses some other company for support: 
chose whatever your supporter recommends after thoroughly analyzing your 
situation.

If you are a newbie and just want to quickly enter Qt development: Linux - use 
the distributions version and ask for help in your local LUG; Windows and Mac 
- currently I would recommend the Nokia SDK, as soon as it exists I would 
recommend mainline. For this use case it does not matter whether you are on 
4.8.1 or 4.8.2, just don't fall too far behind (like 4.5.x). Once you progress 
beyond the initial stage it will be easy for you to download the sources of a 
new release, compile them and integrate the result into your copy of the SDK.




	Konrad
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