[Interest] How to ship Qt5 application on Windows?

[Till Oliver Knoll]

Am 12.09.2012 um 07:17 schrieb Bo Thorsen <bo at fioniasoftware.dk>:

> Den 12-09-2012 06:33, Loaden skrev:
>> Hi, list!
>> Does there exist some documents about how to ship Qt5 application on 
>> Windows?
>> It seems differents with Qt4.
>> It does not work now that If simply copy Qt5***.dll and 
>> platforms/windows.dll into my application dir.
>> e.g.
>> You can't make QtCreator work when using the Qt5 library builds with 
>> MinGW-w64.
>> It's can't load the styleplugin.dll, so the welcome page just show 
>> nothing.
> 
> There was a thread about three days ago with the same problem. You 
> should take a look at it in the archives. I think the conclusion was 
> that he missed a windows.dll plugin, but I didn't follow it closely.

Wasn't me with that problem (yet ;)) in that thread. But yes, it turned out that the "platform plugin" (windows.dll) was missing and the application wouldn't start at all (+ on Mac you have to use the "install_name_tool" to tweak the framework search and ID paths - but that's not the case here ;))

However in this case I understand that the application /does/ start and the "platform plugin" is deployed. The problem rather seems to be that some (all?) other plugins cannot be loaded, specifically the styleplugin.dll (What does that one do? That's new to Qt 5, right? Is it also a "mandatory" plugin to deploy? I don't quite see why a missing "style" plugin would cause the application to "draw nothing". But anyway, let's just assume that the failed style plugin load is responsible for that).

How do you realise that it is the "style plugin" which fails to load? Do you have the "Qt plugin debug" option enabled (I know there is one, set via some environment variable)? Do you get the corresponding message on the console (Command)? Does it "fail" to load (use Dependency Walker and check the dependencies of that plugin, too!), or is it simply "not found"? 

What about other plugins such as images? Do JPEG and PNG images/icons show up?

Cheers,
  Oliver