[Qt-creator] designer plugins

[Pete Klemm]

On 5/16/2013 1:58 AM, Uwe Rathmann wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have to confess, that I don't use the creator myself much, but as
> maintainer of the Qwt library ( http://qwt.sf.net ) I have to deal with a
> lot of frustration concerning being unable to load the Qwt designer plugin
> in the creator - especially on Windows.
>
> So finally I set up a Windows system and tried myself, to find out what
> the reasons are why so many fail:
>
> 1)
> Probably the most important one is, that the designer plugin needs to be
> compiled with the same Qt version and compiler version as the Creator -
> what is often a different one, than the combination the user wants to
> build his application with.
>
> Surprisingly I had to note, that even the Creator inside the MinGW binary
> package of Qt comes with its own libs - incompatible to the libs of the
> package.
>
> 2)
> Qwt users are often engineers or students not always experienced software
> developers. Setting environment variables seems to be a problem.
>
> Unfortunately I couldn't find a way how to tell the creator where to look
> for plugins beside setting QT_PLUGIN_PATH - or copying the plugin into
> the default directories of creator and designer.
>
> 3)
> When loading the designer plugin, the creator also needs to find the Qwt
> library itself. As it is not possible to compile the install path into
> the plugin ( rpath ) on Windows the PATH variable needs to be configured.
>
> --
>
> What I can and will do on my side is to modify the Qwt makefiles to
> compile the Qwt libs statically into the plugin ( to avoid 3) and to
> offer precompiled versions of the Qwt designer plugin that are compatible
> with the current binary packages of the Creator ( to improve 1) ).
>
> On the Creator side I can imagine 3 things to be helpful:
>
> a)
> The information in "About Creator" could be extended to show all relevant
> information, so that a user can identify how a plugin needs to be
> compiled: f.e MinGW vs. MSVC is missing.
>
> b)
> When the plugin has been compiled properly, but I didn't do 3), the
> creator is able to show the information, that the plugin has been found,
> but loading it failed. For all other issues the plugin was silently
> ignored.
>
> Maybe it is possible to improve the diagnostics about why a plugin was
> not loaded - even the simple information that a DLL has been neglected
> without further information is better than nothing.
>
> c)
> To avoid 2) it would be nice if the Creator makes it possible to edit a
> search path for where to look for plugins in its user interface. Maybe it
> is even possible to configure versions of the Creator individually - like
> it can be done with the path where to look for feature files with "qmake -
> set QMAKEFEATURES ...".
>
> Uwe
>
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>
>
Uwe,

I agree completely! These changes would have saved my countless hours 
searching the
web and analyzing Qcreator source.

Pete