[Qt-creator] Dealing with Qt5 symlinks when deploying from Windows

[Oswald Buddenhagen]

On Wed, Dec 03, 2014 at 04:35:05PM -0200, Rafael Roquetto wrote:
> This question regards mainly the QNX plugin for QtC.
> 
it equally affects embedded linux. i think even android.

> Nonetheless, many of our costumers are using Windows as their development
> host, which means that, since Windows does not support symlinks, these are
> actually resolved to duplicates on the host. Once the user presses "Deploy Qt
> libraries", all the duplicates will be deployed to the target, effectively
> causing the deployed size of Qt to grow substantially.
> 
this is a reason why the build tool should ideally directly drive the
deployment tool, rather than installing into an "install root" and
having the deployer attempt to mirror that directory ...

> Since QNX binaries only link against *.so.5 libs, we don't really need the
> rest of them. In your opinion, would simply filtering those duplicate files
> out and deploying just resolved versions of *.so.5 libs be an acceptable
> solution? (I say acceptable becaue it does not really smell that good to me,
> but I can't think of something else).
> 
given that your deployer needs to interpret the install root anyway, you
could transfer the files as symlinks just as well.

otoh, the symlinks *are* actually needed only for building. so in
principle, all our remote unix plugins could just cut down the list of
deployed files ...