[Qt-creator] Some thoughts about 2.5

[Geronimo Ma. Hernandez]

On Montag 28 Mai 2012, André Pönitz wrote:
> On Mon, May 28, 2012 at 06:05:49PM +0200, Geronimo Ma. Hernandez wrote:
> > Again: from my point of view, this behavior of QtCreator is very poor.
> > With all that parsing effort it should be able to rise an appropriate
> > error message, telling the user about an outdated gdb or the like.
> 
> The log file you sent earlier contains:
> 
>    UNSUPPORTED GDB VERSION GNU gdb (GDB) 7.0.1-debian

Oh sir! A message in a initially hidden window does not count at all!
I guess no user is interested in the debug log until he likes to work on that 
item or until he encounters problems.

Why not pop a messagebox, with a (localized - is QtCreator localized?) 
message, telling that the gdb is not supported.

> Sorry to be blunt, but if you move outside the area (and era) of what
> your distribution offers you, _you_ are responsible for making sure
> all dependencies are met.

I partially agree. If I'd build QtCreator from sources, I'd fully agree.

But using a binary installer, that ships all but one requirements?
On debian stable there are no Qt-libs 4.7 or newer - as QtCreator starts, the 
binary installer ships all required libraries, which is quite fine.

Coming back to your car example: To me it looks like shipping a car with 3 
wheels mounted and stating, that the driver is responsible to buy the 4th 
wheel on its own.

From my point of view gdb is as important as the Qt-libraries, as an c++-ide 
is useless without working debugger. 
So why not let the installer check the gdb-version and abort the installation, 
if the gdb is not supported? Of cause, the abort should happen with a nice 
message...
For me, dependency checking is an installer task!

Saying - this or that version of gdb is too expensive to maintain - is 
completely OK, but the handling of that fact is not userfriendly - not at all.

Just my thought

Gero