[Qt-creator] Plugin development - meaning of private headers?

[Ziller Eike]

On Mar 12, 2014, at 4:03 PM, Vitali Baumtrok <aedit at baumtrok.de> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm trying to get into plugin development for the Qt Creator on Linux. 
> Here are my questions:
> 
> 1. Is Qt Creator not a "true" Qt application, because of "Qt Creator 
> requires private headers of Qt, which are unfortunately not installed by 
> the Qt binary packages" [1]?

Qt 5 comes with the private headers.

> 2. Is it really necessary to build Qt Creator from sources to develop 
> plugins?

We do not provide a pure “dev” package with only the libs+ headers. Some headers are generated at build-time, so you need a Qt Creator build tree to compile your own plugins.

> 3. If yes, why?

Because it is effort to provide an extra package.

> 4. Don't I just need only the headers for plugin development, for 
> example "extensionsystem/iplugin.h” ?

See 2.

> My experience was: I download the online installer for Linux from [2] 
> and install it. Let's call it "Qt Creator A". Then I download the 
> sources of Qt Creator from [3] and compile them with Qt Creator A. Let's 
> call the result "Qt Creator B". Now I create a (default) plugin project 
> in Qt Creator A and set the required source and binaries to that of Qt 
> Creator B. Then I compile and run my plugin without problems. So the 
> procedure for compiling Qt with private headers described in [1] isn't 
> needed.

See 1. ;)

> [1] http://doc.qt.digia.com/qtcreator-extending/getting-and-building.html
> [2] http://qt-project.org/downloads
> [3] 
> https://qt.gitorious.org/qt-creator/qt-creator/source/52bf71fbdff62bdcd0c67e0a5edc45b695b3c519:
> _______________________________________________
> Qt-creator mailing list
> Qt-creator at qt-project.org
> http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/qt-creator

-- 
Eike Ziller, Senior Software Engineer - Digia, Qt
 
Digia Germany GmbH, Rudower Chaussee 13, D-12489 Berlin
Geschäftsführer: Mika Pälsi, Juha Varelius, Tuula Haataja
Sitz der Gesellschaft: Berlin, Registergericht: Amtsgericht Charlottenburg, HRB 144331 B