[Interest] Desktop deployment

[Yves Bailly]

Greetings all,

Here's a maybe silly question, but I really couldn't find any valuable help from
the documentation.

Let's assume I'm creating an application, development and target platforms being
Windows 7, using Visual C++.

If I want to give my .exe file to someone, I usually have to give him an archive
containing my .exe, *and* a copy of all the needed Qt's libraries, including
the plugins. Taking care to don't forget the "qt.conf" file. So that the executable
can be executed just by a double-click in the explorer.

Until now, I was *manually* copying the needed *.dlls from Qt's directory to the
directory in which my executable is build. Which can be quite cumbersome, to say
the least, having to filter out the *.lib, *.pdb, the debug flavors, and so on.

Is there any way to automatically copy the needed files in the "right" place?
Some kind of deployment option (similar to what exists for Android), or even
better, some magical variable or function to include in the project file and
processed by qmake?

Going further, let's assume my application depends on various libraries, also
created and managed my myself and other collegues. How to make sure all the final
*.lib, *.dll and so on are placed in the same folder? It's always possible to use
the same target folder for in shadow building for several projects in QtCreator,
but this doesn't seem easily movable from a developer to another. Is there any
other solution, unless to "manually" adjust DESTDIR, DLLDESTDIR and the likes
in the project file?

Thanks for any hints.

-- 
      /- Yves Bailly - Software developer   -\
      \- Sescoi R&D  - http://www.sescoi.fr -/
"The possible is done. The impossible is being done. For miracles,
thanks to allow a little delay."