[Qt-interest] Deploying apps in MacOS

[Alexandre Courbot]

Deploying on Mac is indeed much easier since macdeployqt is
distributed with Qt (starting from 4.5,if I remember correctly). I
only have one complain about it, that it copies all plugins
inconditionally - being able to specify a list of plugins to copy
would help reducing the size of the bundle.

<rant>
The problem that remains is to create a nice .dmg installer.
Macdeployqt is capable of creating a .dmg image, but it is clearly not
decent for the end-user to use (i.e. no "Drop the icon into the
application folder"). Because of that, it's still more convenient to
create a Windows-based installer using NSIS, since one only have to
specify the DLLs and plugins to use and end up with a pretty usable
installer. Right, there are tutorials for creating dmg images (see
http://digital-sushi.org/entry/how-to-create-a-disk-image-installer-for-apple-mac-os-x/
), but seriously this is a lot of hassle for a simple drag'n drop
installer!

Last point, the fact that Qt libraries must be embedded with the
application makes the whole thing *huge*, but Qt is not to blame for
that. Here, both Mac and Windows suck equally - when will there be a
decent packaging and dependencies software that is available out of
the box on these systems?
</rant>

Alex.