[Interest] Interest Digest, Vol 86, Issue 17

[Roland Hughes]

Alexander:

Having burned multiple days with https://github.com/probonopd/linuxdeployqt

I need to warn you, it is only for simple applications which can compile on Ubuntu 14.04 using a dated version of Qt. If you need a current webengine or other current features you will be resoundingly disappointed. If your application has plug-ins (be they browser or some other kind) the tool isn't good at finding their library dependencies. They also refuse to add a -include-lib-dir type switch were you could park all of the libraries it missed so it could easily scoop them up.

This may or may not be an issue for you, but, AppImage is something of an inverted philosophy. It's not "one Deb to rule them all" which is how things were done in the past. Each AppImage is built specifically for the target. For us that was a complete show stopper. More than 90% of the machines running the application globally have zero Internet connection. One box, somewhere, does. It pulls down the package and installs on all of the other machines via sneaker-net. Hardware and OS version vary wildly. (At its Internet connection peak, 1 in 7 machines had Internet access. That has since been reduced.)

Don't know if you will be providing support or not, but, from a support standpoint, you really have no idea what got delivered.

What really floors me about the Linux world and even the Qt world with respect to Webengine or plug-ins, is this desperate clinging to dynamic linking. It was a bad idea which got worse over time. Take a look at the current AppImage path. Rather than admit dynamic linking was a failed experiment, they are now packaging entire dynamic libraries repeatedly.

Back in the days of DOS, we only linked the functions we needed. Not the entire 300+Meg library we didn't need. Only a tiny set of INT-21 and 3 other INTs were expected to be provided by the OS.

While some will find it useful, Snappy hasn't delivered on its promises. I haven't spent enough time with Flatpak to say if it is taking the correct approach or is simply more the same.

Just my 0.0002 cents. Having recently walked this road.


On 11/16/18 10:52 AM, Alexander Dyagilev wrote:
> Hello,
>
> On Windows we have windeployqt.
>
> On MAC - macdeployqt.
>
> On Linux - there is no tool for this ? Is there some convenient
> alternative way to copy all the required Qt files then (my project uses
> Quick Controls 2)?

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Roland Hughes, President
Logikal Solutions
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