[Qt-interest] [OT] Politically Correct way to release an Open Source Qt Project

[Daniel Price]

> installers became really necessary  when applications began to replace
> numerous system shared libs. Windows Applications were more and more
> based on
> the latest ms*.dll 's , so every application had to inspect the version
> of
> each needed lib and to replace oder libs...

Yes and this is a biggest reason for the continued popularity of MSVC 6; Applications built with VC6 are almost always guaranteed to work on every PC because they rely only on very old system DLLs.

.Net developers have to bundle and installer to the required .Net runtime because it may not exist on the target platform.

But this is a case of developers being forced to find solutions to a fragmented platform design.

Linux has similar problems so it's not just MS are fault here :)

>
> Of course this is not necessary if the systems libs are well designed
> and
> reliable, no application needs to replace it ;-)
>
> Think about Qt shared libs: it is eaysy to copy each needed Qt lib into
> the
> application directory - no version conflict, no decision to replace
> older
> libs... But: ist this the goal of shared libraries?

Yes which is exactly what we do with OSX deployment - the required Qt libs are copied to the bindle and their paths are registered with the binary. This is hidden from the user.

You can do something similar on Windows but you cannot tie libraries and executables together - Windows uses its own rules for finding libraries (one of the causes of DLL hell). The only thing you can do is place the DLLs in the same directory as the executable and hope they are picked up correctly. If the user moves them, your application breaks.


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