[Releasing] Tests and Qt 4 tarballs

[Gladhorn Frederik]

Hi Robin,

On Dec 5, 2012, at 07:46 , Robin Burchell <robin+qt at viroteck.net> wrote:

> Hello world,
> 
> I was stuck with a mildly puzzling problem yesterday: figuring out why
> a patch didn't apply to a fresh Qt 4 tarball in our build system. So,
> for the first time in more or less my entire Qt career, I unpacked the
> tarball (usually, I just use git), to find out that the patch was
> failing to apply because it touched the tests/ directory, which
> apparently isn't packaged in the release tarballs (at least for 4.8.3
> and 4.8.4).
> 
> This seems fundamentally wrong to me: a vendor doesn't want to just
> use Qt, they also want to test it, to make sure that it functions as
> expected on their system (and that patches they may apply don't break
> it in ways they don't expect) - and is also at odds with how Qt 5 is
> packaged -- where the tests supposedly are included.
> 
> I don't really know who is responsible for releasing Qt 4, but can you
> please consider packaging tests for 4.8.5 to bring things in line with
> Qt 5, and bring a little more sanity to things? Or if there is a
> reason why they aren't packaged: what is it?

Traditionally Qt was never released with tests.
I completely agree with you that we should change that.
I guess the main argument agains it is tar ball size, but we could offer packages with or without tests.

Actually I spent some time in Nokia to get legal clearance for the tests since Linux distributions would also like to have them in the tar balls. There was just no release done by Nokia any more…

I think it boils down to us making a decision to just do it here. Speaking to packagers from Suse, Ubuntu and Debian I got positive feedback on this one.

(of course this goes for Qt5 as well)

Greetings
Frederik




> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Robin
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