[Qt-creator] Ok to skip compiling Qt Creator first when building my plugin in Linux?

[Henry Skoglund]

Hi,

when working in Qt Creator I use my homegrown plugin, built for Qt 
Creator in Ubuntu, OSX and Windows. It works nicely except when there's 
a new release of Qt Creator, then you need to download and compile/build 
Qt Creator (takes about 30 minutes) and then rebuild my plugin for that 
new version of Qt Creator.
At least it used to take that time, recently (when upgrading to Qt 
Creator 4.0) I discovered a shortcut for my Qt Creator installation in 
Ubuntu:

In my plugin's .pro file, I changed the IDE_BUILD_TREE env. variable to 
point to my vanilla Qt Creator installation (e.g. 
IDE_BUILD_TREE=/home/henry/Qt/Tools/QtCreator).

And I could build my plugin just fine, it even got placed in the correct 
position directly 
(/home/henry/Qt/Tools/QtCreator/lib/qtcreator/plugins). Restarted Qt 
Creator and voila, my plugin was up and running in Qt Creator 4.0 in 
just a few seconds, not 30 minutes of waiting for gcc.

So, my question is, is my skipping of waiting for gcc kosher or not? I 
know this feat is not possible on Windows, because there Visual Studio 
aborts with "LINK : fatal error LNK1181: cannot open input file 'Core.lib'"

On Windows you obviously need to compile to obtain those .lib files, but 
on Linux, it seems Qt Creator does not require or use .a files? And that 
the .so files present in ~/Qt/Tools/QtCreator/lib/qtcreator and 
~/Qt/Tools/QtCreator/lib/qtcreator/plugins already have all the needed 
linking information for building my plugin in them?

(Forgive my ignorance, I'm kind of Linux noob) /Rgrds Henry