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

[Ian Clark]

On 1 August 2010 16:59, Paul England <pengland at cmt-asia.com> wrote:
> Okay, this is semi-OT, but I think this is the best place to ask it.
>
> I've got an open-source project that is near the first release, and am about
> to upload it to sourceforge.  It will really only be run on a Mac or Windows
> machine, as it's an "assistant" type of application for an app that only
> runs on those two platforms. My project  run on Linux, but I doubt anyone
> other than me will really care.
>
:)

> So, the source all tar'ed up is a given, but for the Mac binary, what's the
> standard practice?  After I compile it can I just zip the myapplication.app
> file upload that?  This is actually the first time I've compiled/ran a Qt
> app on the Mac so I'm a bit lost.  I have an old XP box lying around here
> and have the latest Qt on it.  I assume compiling a Win32 executable will
> suffice for all Win users?
>
Whilst I'm no expert I maintain a small twitter application, which I
develop on windows, but ship across Windows, OSX and Linux. (Thank you
Qt!!!), and I've found the following seems to work quite well.

On windows I create a small installer (Using Nullsofts free installer
system: http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Main_Page), which packages the
application, the qt dlls needed and the qt config to get the app to
use the bundled DLLs. This works well, and I'd be happy to post my
installer script here if anyone's interested.

On linux I have a packaging script, that packages the exe, the qt .so
files and a run script into a gzipped tar file.

On OSX I did investigate creating a DMG, which seems to be the
preferred way to do it, however these did turn out a lot larger than
just bzip2ing the .app bundle, so now I just distribute .tbz files for
the mac users too, and haven't had any complaints. I do this because
of bandwidth though, so if that's not an issue a .dmg is probably the
preferred way.

NB, for OSX the osxpackager script (which is now included with Qt) is
invaluable, otherwise you'll have terrible headaches getting things to
work on other peoples machine that work fine on your own. (because of
frameworks being in the wrong place.) Manually repointing all the Qt
frameworks and including them in the app bundle is not a trivial task!

Cheers,

Ian