[Qt-interest] VS 2010?

[Ross Bencina]

Eric Clark wrote:
> Unfortunately, I am an open-source and free help guru. I frequent this 
> message board answering as many questions as I can (having been a Qt 
> developer for 8 years now) and typically ask any questions I have here, on 
> the message board,  not through the support that we pay for. As a matter 
> of fact, after 8 years of being the lead Qt developer here at my company, 
> I have never put in a support ticket or communicated with Qt through our 
> commercial support system. Most of the people who frequent this board are 
> very knowledgable, helpful, and friendly (I say that last one loosely). 
> And many times, it helps to have many heads  looking at the same problem 
> as opposed to the few that look at a support ticket. Plus, my question may 
> just help someone else that is not a commercial customer.
<<<

In principal I agree. My questions are often about Windows or OSX-specific 
problems/bugs/unimplemented things and I'd say I get a response here about 
50% of the time, vs 100% from Qt support. Of course I have little 
credibility here compared to the gurus, I try to answer questions sometimes 
but often I am just too busy (and besides I have my own OSS project where I 
spend my time supporting a community). Nothing against this list of course, 
it is wonderful. But I am happy to pay for support who always listen and 
answer irrespective of my list karma.


>> Can't you automate all this and farm it out to EC2 or something? If 
>> someone
>> offered a service to build custom Qt builds remotely I would consider 
>> using it
>> too.
>
> Yes, I can automate this if I know it is going to build. I am not familiar 
> with the term EC2, maybe you could enlighten me?

EC2 is Amazon's elastic-compute web service. You can automate bring-up of 
virtual machines and only pay for the CPU time you use -- which for building 
Qt every few months is likely to be almost nothing (a few dollars). I'm sure 
MS and others have similar offerings. I took a look recently and couldn't 
find a standard EC2 image with Visual Studio installed but I imagine it's 
doable, eg:
http://www.godavidgo.com/blog/post/2010/09/22/How-to-setup-a-Visual-Studio-development-instance-in-the-Amazon-EC2-Cloud.aspx

The thing about EC2 instances is that you can put them to sleep and pay 
nothing (well just the cost of storing the OS image) until you need to do 
another build.


> The other issue is that if Qt does not make a build for the particular 
> version of VS I am on, it typically means that the build for that version 
> requires many changes to get it to build from what I have seen in the past 
> anyway...

I havn't experienced that myself, but I have been using VS2005 for the whole 
time I've used Qt. I dare not upgrade at this stage. If what you say is 
true, then of course this creates a bit of a problem for automated builds!


> Thank you for your comments Ross! It is nice to know that there are other 
> people out there that have very similar problems.


Best wishes

Ross.