[Qt-jambi-interest] Using the system qt4 libs

[Eskil Abrahamsen Blomfeldt]

Helge Fredriksen wrote:
> Really, such strange deployment issues really makes it tough to
> tease open source developers into using Jambi. Having to compile and
> distribute the whole Qt system each time you want do develop something
> in Jambi makes it look really obscure to most developers.

Hi, Helge.

This is really no different from how Linux applications are usually 
distributed. Since there are no guarantees made for the libraries 
available on the system, it's difficult to make binary packages that 
will work on all/most distributions (see e.g. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base), which is why 
different distributions build their own binary packages and have 
applications suites to manage these packages. We were hoping that the 
maintainers of the Linux distributions would make Qt Jambi packages on 
their systems, as they have done with Qt, which would have made 
deployment on Linux a lot easier.

For us, this is made more difficult by the fact that a fair share of 
Linux distributions have Qt 4 pre-installed to support KDE 4, and by the 
fact that Qt Jambi requires certain build flags to be set to work around 
bugs in the JVM, which makes it binary incompatible with the standard 
installation of Qt.

Personally, I think the .jar-file deployment is simple and nice, and 
hides as many of the gritty details as possible. If anyone wants to 
deploy their application using rpm or apt, however, they are free to do 
so. We are only providing you with an option which solves many of the 
deployment issues which you would otherwise have to consider.

-- Eskil