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

[Eike Ziller]

> On 5. Jun 2018, at 15:32, Davide Coppola <vivaladav at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Thanks Eike and Carel for your replies.
> 
> All you said makes sense, even if I have to confirm that when building my plugin for 4.6.0 I can't run it with 4.6.1 as it crashes the program with the following error:
> 
> ./qtcreator: symbol lookup error: /home/m3xican/.local/share/data/QtProject/qtcreator/plugins/4.6.1/libSIGBUILD.so: undefined symbol: _ZN4Core12IOptionsPageC2EP7QObject
> 
> Not a huge deal, but apparently the backward compatibility was broken in 4.6.1

Indeed. Very sorry about that. We should look into at least half-automated testing for this in the future.

> Cheers
> 
> On Fri, 1 Jun 2018 at 07:59, Eike Ziller <Eike.Ziller at qt.io> wrote:
> 
> > 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
> Rudower Chaussee 13
> D-12489 Berlin
> eike.ziller at qt.io
> http://qt.io
> Geschäftsführer: Mika Pälsi,
> Juha Varelius, Mika Harjuaho
> Sitz der Gesellschaft: Berlin, Registergericht: Amtsgericht Charlottenburg, HRB 144331 B
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Davide Coppola
> 
> website:	http://www.davidecoppola.com
> blog:	http://blog.davidecoppola.com

-- 
Eike Ziller
Principal Software Engineer

The Qt Company GmbH
Rudower Chaussee 13
D-12489 Berlin
eike.ziller at qt.io
http://qt.io
Geschäftsführer: Mika Pälsi,
Juha Varelius, Mika Harjuaho
Sitz der Gesellschaft: Berlin, Registergericht: Amtsgericht Charlottenburg, HRB 144331 B