[Interest] Qt Lite 5.8

[Kai, Koehne]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mark diener [mailto:rpzrpzrpz at gmail.com]
> Sent: Monday, January 30, 2017 3:05 PM
> To: Tor Arne, Vestbø <Tor.arne.Vestbo at qt.io>
> Cc: Kai, Koehne <Kai.Koehne at qt.io>; interest at qt-project.org; Jake,
> Petroules <Jake.Petroules at qt.io>
> Subject: Re: Qt Lite 5.8
> 
> Ok,
> 
> Maybe someone at Qt could direct us to the Qt Lite documention?

Qt Lite isn't a product, but an initiative (see also the original announcement at  http://blog.qt.io/blog/2016/08/18/introducing-the-qt-lite-project-qt-for-any-platform-any-thing-any-size/ ). As such there's no 'Qt Lite documentation'.

Anyhow, the part of Qt Lite that you might refer to is the rework of the Qt configuration system. Qt always had configure arguments for some features, but they were hard-coded in the configure script, and mostly limited to the libraries in qtbase. There was also a feature system based on a qfeatures.txt file, which however was not getting much attention and deteriorated over time.

We now have a modular system where every Qt module can declare its options and features (including dependencies) in a declarative 'configure.json' file. These features can then be switched on and off from the top-level configure call. A lot of the Qt modules already make use of this to allow developers to enable or disable features that weren't exposed before.

There's also a graphical tool that shows the features (currently only for Qt for Device creation): http://doc.qt.io/QtForDeviceCreation/qt-configuration-tool.html . You can also look up features through the configure.json files in the sources.

> Or any information about it so that your customers can be successful.
> 
> Right now, there is only dependency build failure hell.

The new system doesn't guarantee that feature dependencies are always correctly represented, and there might still be feature permutations that lead to compilation errors. But the new setup should help us maintaining and fixing the dependencies much more easily, as well as adding new ones.

Regards

Kai