Opened 19 years ago
Last modified 18 years ago
#20 new enhancement
Provide official binary and runtime distributions
Reported by: | dmik | Owned by: | dmik |
---|---|---|---|
Priority: | normal | Milestone: | qt-os2-3.3.1-rc07 |
Component: | [general] | Version: | |
Severity: | normal | Keywords: | official distributions |
Cc: |
Description
We want to provide official binary and runtime distributions of the Qt Toolkit downloadable as wpi and/or zip archives.
The main purpose of these distributions is to allow to effectively share the same Qt DLL among various Qt applications (including applications from different vendors) on the user's machine without running into the DLL Hell issue (which is very likely otherwise, because Qt DLLs built by vendors themselves can be easily made binary incompatible even within the same code base, by enabling/disabling various components for example).
For obvious reasons, the official build will always contain all the features enabled. New binary builds will be provided for every public release with the Qt DLL named according to the release version in order to make it unique.
Besides this, the official binary distribution will simplify installing and using the Qt Toolkit for new developers (by avoiding the lengthy compilation process) and will reduce the size of the distribution (because the sources will not be included).
The runtime distribution (intended for end-users of Qt applications) will allow to reduce the size of the application distribution archives (or installers) by excluding the Qt DLL from the distributions. This is especially useful in case when a new version of the application gets out that uses the same Qt version.
Since the build system is already modified so that official Qt DLL builds are now distinguished from custom builds (see ticket:18 for more details), the only thing that needs to be done is to provide a set of scripts to gather binary and runtime distribution archives as well as the simplified version of the configure script to configure the binary distribution after installation (set up the default library type, build the qt.cmd helper shell script, compile sources and tutorials, etc.).