[Qt-creator] Weird version reporting

[Eike Ziller]

> On 30. Aug 2019, at 02:36, Christian Gagneraud <chgans at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi there,
> 
> Not a blocker at all for me, not even an annoyance, but i just wonder
> what is going on.
> 
> I have Qt SDK installed, with the latest stable QtC along the current "preview".
> I have 2 4.9.2 instances open, from the task bar (KUbuntu-18.04), one
> instance is reported as "QtC 4.10.0-rc1 (see
> https://imgur.com/jT2cHpl)".
> But when i go to check the version in the about dialog, both instances
> report as 4.9.2 (Built on Jun 26 2019, rev 8181...).
> I launch QtC from the shell, and i indeed launch the stable version.
> 
> Has anyone seen this kind of behaviour?

After some research:

The basic issue here is that on Linux the “desktop file” which describes these things like application names and icons and “grouping” in the task bar/dock is defined in files completely separate from the actual application files...

As far as I understand it, matching is done via a property called WM_CLASS, and the file that describes display name and icon specifies the WM_CLASS it should be used for.
Qt sets the WM_CLASS of an application to the executable name and the application name.
Qt uses the application name also for the settings file name.

We even try to set different display names depending on if you installed ‘enterprise’ or ‘community’.
And there is the desktop file that Linux distributions might use...

I don’t really see a sensible way to solve this. Maybe the most honest way would be to not even try, and just call all the same.
If someone has a good idea, please speak up ;)

-- 
Eike Ziller
Principal Software Engineer

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