[Qt-creator] Some issues concerning dlls in the qt sdk

[Yue Wang]

Hi,


I am new here. but I am a long time QT4 user (I have been using QT4
since 4.0) and I tried qt creator since its first public beta last
year. After using it, I found some problems, but I thought it would be
reported by active users. However, after trying QT Creator 1.0 in QT
4.5 SDK, these problems are still there. So i think it is time for me
to report them.

- There are too many copies of QT dlls. I can find complete set of QT
dlls in Qt\2009.01\bin, Qt\2009.01\qt\bin and Qt\2009.01\qt\lib, each
with release and debug versions. It is better to remove them. In QT
Creator beta snapshot, this is not possible since beta use qt 4.4 but
the creator depends on 4.5. However, now both qt and creator in the
sdk use 4.5, so it can save a lot of space if we delete them. (one
copy of release build and debug build occupies 360MB)

- In QT SDK, all the demos and examples are included. Usually they are
only for presentation, not for debugging, so it is better to provide
the release build only. However, all the examples provide both release
build and debug build, which make the directory too large. We should
remove the useless debug build them to save space. (There are  about
100 examples, each debug build occupies 3MB)

- Usually developers use QT for software development, not for
debugging QT (only Nokia guys develop QT). Wouldn't it be better to
remove the debug library completely?

- When debugging in QT Creator under Windows, gdb might take half a
minute to load all the symbols in the library. Usually one step of
execution takes about 10 seconds, which makes the debugging feature
unusable.This is because the debug builds of the apps are linked to
debug build of the library, which are very huge (for example, debug
build of QtGui is 74MB). As I said in the previous point, usually
developers only need to test their own apps, not QT. So it will be
much better to link debug version of app to release version of QT
library. This will save a lot of loading time. Stepping the lines also
becomes much more efficient. I think this should be set default in QT
Creator when building the apps on Windows systems.

- all the static library file (libqtxxx.a) are included in
\Qt\2009.01\qt\lib. But I find no way to build a static version of my
app. How? And I also think we can  leave a "static build" option in QT
Creator, or remove the static library completely.

In a nutshell, I suggest that we can
- remove duplicated dlls
- remove debug dlls
- remove debug builds in qt/example
- leave a option in QT Creator for static build
- make the default option that debug apps are linked to release build of qt dlls
These will make debugging on Windows much faster, and also strip the
full sdk installation from 1.8G to only 500MB but functional.


Yue Wang