[Qt-creator] Making an installer of Qt creator plugin on Windows

[Eike Ziller]

> On 2. May 2019, at 18:34, Artem Razin <artem.razin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I am really a newbie in Qt world, and unfortunately Google didn't help
> me this time.
> 
> Currently I am working on an installer for my plugin for Qt Creator on
> Windows, but I just can't find a good way to enumerate all installed
> Qt Creators (to copy the plugin dll to a plugin directory of each
> installed version).
> 
> I realized that (at least) fresh Qt builds can be found in
> HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\***,
> so an installer could check all such entries, then check presence of
> qtcreator.exe in <InstallLocation>\Tools\QtCreator\bin\qtcreator.exe
> (<InstallLocation> is a value of "InstallLocation" in
> HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\***).
> 
> Is there a better way?
> 
> Might it happen that this way will not work, i.e. probably there is
> another way of installing Qt Creator?

There are the Qt Creator-only offline installers which install to <InstallLocation>\bin\qtcreator.exe
And I think e.g. chocolatey has a Qt Creator package too, and possibly other “unofficial” ways.

> What's a common way to distribute Qt creator plugins? Just looked at
> qtc-cppcheck, and they just distribute a compiled dll, without an
> installer at all...

Since “installing” a plugin in Qt Creator means to just drop some files somewhere, you probably could just ask?

Another location that Qt Creator looks for _user_ specific plugins is in
%LOCALAPPDATA%\QtProject\qtcreator\plugins\X.Y.Z
where X.Y.Z is the Qt Creator version.

Which makes me aware that we should probably make it look in X.Y too nowadays, since we provide binary compatibility through patch releases since a while...

Br, Eike

-- 
Eike Ziller
Principal Software Engineer

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