[Interest] My first 5 years with Qt and 2 suggestions

[Jani Heikkinen]

Hi!

Thanks for your comments/suggestions. For first one there is actually a jira ticket already in place, see https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTIFW-1230. But to be honest I am not sure when it will be implemented...

br,
Jani Heikkinen
Release Manager

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Interest <interest-bounces at qt-project.org> On Behalf Of Henry
> Skoglund
> Sent: torstai 9. toukokuuta 2019 3.10
> To: interest at qt-project.org
> Subject: [Interest] My first 5 years with Qt and 2 suggestions
> 
> Hi, 5 years ago I started with Qt, it's been a very nice ride, thank you! Looking
> forward to the next 5. Got 2 suggestions:
> 
> 
> 1) Make Qt more easily accessable for first timers:
> 
> Why not introduce a Qt Starter Pack?
> 
> I'm thinking of an *extremely* simplified installation tool. For
> Windows, it could be Qt LTS version bundled with the 32-bit MinGW
> compiler.
> 
> No login, no selection of kits and no selection of a directory where to
> install (instead hardwired to C:\Qt). Just one big button: "Install".
> 
> Uninstall is done through the control panel. No updates possible,
> uninstall/download/reinstall only.
> 
> 
> 2) Improved Qt DLL morphology: for a given DLL, today we have very
> coarse naming schemes, it's either Qt4Core.dll, Qt5Core.dll or
> Qt6Core.dll (and similar namings on the other platforms).
> 
> On the Qt forums I see questions, they have the MinGW version installed,
> and instead of windeployqt, for deployment they have manually copied the
> DLLs from the QtCreator bin directory --> DLL hell.
> 
> Or they have a Qt program like Krita installed on their C:, and some
> PATH setting causes Qt DLLs to clash with their Qt installation or
> deployment --> DLL hell.
> 
> Or they have copied Qt5Core.dll with wrong bitness, 64 instead of 32 etc.
> 
> For that last syndrome, I remember from my Visual Basic days, there were
> 16-bit and 32-bit versions, but Microsoft had different DLL names then,
> either VBRUN40016.DLL or VBRUN40032.DLL. (Today for example
> vcruntime140.dll has the same name regardless of bitness, 32-bit version
> is in C:\Windows\SysWOW64 and 64-bit version is in C:\Windows\System32,
> if this seems logical you need to change medication.)
> 
> So my suggestion is, let's reverse this trend, introduce a much more
> fine-grained naming scheme, examples:
> 
> Qt5Core.dll for Qt 5.12.3 MSVC2017   32-bit --> QtCore51203MS1732.dll
> Qt5Core.dll for Qt 5.12.3 MSVC2017   64-bit --> QtCore51203MS1764.dll
> Qt5Core.dll for Qt 5.12.3 MinGW7.3.0 32 bit --> QtCore51203GW7332.dll
> Qt5Core.dll for Qt 5.12.3 MinGW7.3.0 64 bit --> QtCore51203GW7364.dll
> 
> Qt5Gui.dll for Qt 5.12.3 MSVC2017   32-bit --> QtGui51203MS1732.dll
> Qt5Gui.dll for Qt 5.12.3 MSVC2017   64-bit --> QtGui51203MS1764.dll
> Qt5Gui.dll for Qt 5.12.3 MinGW7.3.0 32 bit --> QtGui51203GW7332.dll
> Qt5Gui.dll for Qt 5.12.3 MinGW7.3.0 64 bit --> QtGui51203GW7364.dll
> 
> and so on.
> 
> This naming scheme would eliminate lots of DLL hells occurring today in
> Windows, and would be much more tolerant/allowing to a Windows system
> having multiple Qt installations of different versions.
> 
> Rgrds Henry
> 
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