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

[Carel Combrink]

Hi,

As the developer for the SpellChecker plugin[1] I am currently at a stage
where I only build releases as needed. This can be downloaded from the
release page [2].

Normally I only need to create a binary for the major.minor releases, then
it works on the patch releases as well.
This however failed for QtCreator v4.6.1, for some reason 4.6.1 could not
load my plugin built for 4.6.0.
In the past this was not an issue. Not sure why this happens.
(Perhaps something that I did wrong, something that caused it in QtC, any
information would be nice?)

I build for MSVC 32 and 64 bit, using MSVC compiler. Normally I try to just
build for the QtC version released along with the installers, trying to
match the Qt and compiler version.
I also build for Linux 64 bit, but normally only use the latest Ubuntu.
Based on some feedback I have also started building for Ubuntu 16.04 since
the last release for QtC 4.6.1.
I can't build plugins for MacOS since I do not own a Mac.

I have a general impression that most people use QtCreator from the
installers, thus I just build releases for those versions.
If someone build QtC themselves, I provide proper (I hope) steps for them
to build the plugin as well.

Building is currently a tedious process, but since I am not actively
developing the plugin I make releases only as QtC versions are released,
and then I just do it.
If I start developing more actively I will probably set up some CI builds
for the plugin.

For me this is working quite well at the moment.

[1] https://github.com/CJCombrink/SpellChecker-Plugin
[2] https://github.com/CJCombrink/SpellChecker-Plugin/releases

Regards,
Carel

On Thu, May 31, 2018 at 3:47 PM, 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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...
>
> I also noticed an abandoned Qt Creator plugin scripting project
> <http://code.qt.io/cgit/playground/qt-creator/plugin-scripting.git/> in
> the Qt repos. Any chance something like that will be restarted? Maybe using
> the new/upcoming improved Python integration?
>
> Cheers
>
> --
> *Davide Coppola*
>
> *website:* http://www.davidecoppola.com
> *blog:* http://blog.davidecoppola.com
>
> <http://plus.google.com/+DavideCoppola>
> <http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidecoppola>
> <http://www.twitter.com/vivaladav>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Qt-creator mailing list
> Qt-creator at qt-project.org
> http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/qt-creator
>
>
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