[Interest] Is Qt Library for OS X frameworks only?

[Daniel Price]

The idea behind frameworks on OSX is that you bundle the library, it's headers and any associated resources (images, nibs etc) into one unit that the Finder sees as a single file.

That's all very well for the rare occasion in which a Cocoa application needs to include some other framework (like Sparkle) or for system-wide frameworks but for Qt app it has the following consequences:

1) Because Qt has to be deployed with the .app, you have include the Frameworks which also includes every single .h file, bloating the size of the .app. Even a trivial app must include QtGui which is *huge*.

2) Because the install_names of the .dylibs deep inside the bundle are typically wrong, they have to be changed so that the application binary can find them. The binary's install_name table also has to be updated. So you have to pass long file paths to the install name tool (@rpath/Frameworks/QtGui.Framework/versions/A/blahblah), either manually or via a script. And each .dylib file needs to have its dependencies updated too. Very error prione. Anyone who has ever deployed a QWebKit app on OSX can attest to this.

3) It's pointless. The Qt libraries include all their images etc in binary form so there's nothing else in the bundle, beside the headers, which you don't need. The only exception is the qt_menu.nib which you need to deploy manually. Also, because you can't really 'share' the deployed frameworks among multiple Qt applications, the memory benefits of Frameworks is negated. And because you only ship one version of Qt, the version management of Frameworks is negated too.

Finally, the mac_deploy_qt tool should be avoided. It deploys everything, including all plugins, regardless of if you use them or not, bloating your application size. It's also proven to be pretty buggy in the past.

If you've put the effort into porting you app to OSX, do it properly. Build Qt without frameworks, deploy the .dylibs to your bundle and use a post-build script to set the install names. There's a tool called mac dylib bundler which can do much of this work for you (http://macdylibbundler.sourceforge.net/).


-----Original Message-----
From: interest-bounces+daniel.price=fxhome.com at qt-project.org [mailto:interest-bounces+daniel.price=fxhome.com at qt-project.org] On Behalf Of Andrea Franceschini
Sent: 17 October 2012 16:17
Cc: interest at qt-project.org
Subject: Re: [Interest] Is Qt Library for OS X frameworks only?

2012/10/17 Daniel Price <daniel.price at fxhome.com>:

> I always build Qt on the Mac without frameworks. I have no idea why
> Qt/mac defaults to using fraweworks as they add no value (with one
> exception - the dummy menu nib) and just make deployment 1000x harder.

I may very well be wrong on this but I thought frameworks get included in the app bundle, hence making deployment way easier (but obviously heavier as it's almost like statically linking libs inside the executable). I find the shared libs deploy-once-run-everything better from an engineering point of view, but I recognise Apple's bundles and frameworks have some good points (like avoiding littering the filesystem with exotic libs that are only used by one application).

--
Andrea Franceschini
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