[Qt-creator] Qt Creator plugin distribution - best practices and future plans

[Eike Ziller]

> On May 31, 2018, at 15:47, Davide Coppola <vivaladav at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I am about to release a plugin for Qt Creator and even if I have no problem in releasing the source code, I would like to release binaries as well for quick installing.
> 
> I have the impression that this is not an easy task as I should release a different binary per Qt Creator version and that wouldn't even cover all the combinations of application/compiler.

Platform/compiler combinations that we use for our Qt Project prebuilt binaries are currently:

MSVC2015 32&64 bit
Linux / GCC 5.3(?) 64 bit
macOS / Clang / 64 bit

You also have to use a Qt version that is compatible with the Qt version that the prebuilt binary uses. (4.6 == Qt 5.10, i.e. it should work if you compile with Qt <= 5.10).

You can find the detailed information on which compiler & Qt was used for a Qt Creator binary in its Help > About Qt Creator dialog.

> For example a friend tested my plugin with the Qt Creator package provided by Arch Linux and it was crashing for him, likely because they build Qt Creator with gcc 7 and I built the plugin with gcc 5.4.

I doubt that you’ll be able to create a single prebuilt binary that works on all Linux distributions. Already the locations and versions of standard libraries can differ, as well as Qt versions etc etc.

> Are they any best practices or "standard" ways to handle this?
> 
> Is there any plan from the Qt Creator developers to relax the version parity requirement?
> Ideally I would like to build a plugin for 4.6 and have it running with all 4.6.x versions at least, instead of having to build it for 4.6.0, 4.6.1, etc…

We try to keep patch releases _backwards_ compatible to the .0 release, and the version compatibility information reflects that (i.e. 4.6.1 states that it is compatible with 4.6.0).
That means:
- If you build your plugin against 4.6.0, it will run in 4.6.1 and 4.6.2.
- If you build your plugin against 4.6.1, it will run in 4.6.2, but _not_ in 4.6.0.

> I also noticed an abandoned Qt Creator plugin scripting project in the Qt repos. Any chance something like that will be restarted? Maybe using the new/upcoming improved Python integration?

We talked about the potential of PySide for platform independent plugins for Qt Creator recently, but we don’t have concrete plans for it yet.

Br, Eike

-- 
Eike Ziller
Principal Software Engineer

The Qt Company GmbH
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