Building and Deploying
I'm doing some research for a book chapter on building and deploying Qt applications and I'm wondering if you have an opinion. If so, mail me. I'm e8johan and I use gmail.
The most obvious thing to cover will be QMake and its abilites. This means platform optionals, building a complete project (subdirs, libs, plugins and apps) and the INSTALLS variable. A complement to QMake is QConf. Some platform specifics for Mac and Windows will also be touched (universal binaries, Windows app icons).
Something else that I consider covering is CMake. Is this necessary? Will CMake be so common that it is a good thing to cover in a Qt book?
posted by Johan Thelin @ 14:04
5 comments
5 Comments:
Some helpful links:
http://doc.trolltech.com/qq/qq18-bazaar.html
http://www.trolltechvideo.com/video/day1/room_b/b_1_2/video.html
Hope it helps,
Harald
I think it would be great if CMake is covered. I believe that many people who will read this book will read it because they would like to learn programming for KDE. And since KDE 4 will use CMake it would be nice if the book had at least some introduction about it. And who knows, maybe some other developer will also learn about CMake this way and try it out and maybe even like it more than QMake. In my opinion it is good to present alternatives to people. Some may find one easier to use, other may find the other one easier.
CMake ?
Sure :-)
Ok, no surprise here ;-)
Yes, since it is the buildsystem for KDE4 it is becoming very common.
Google for "Qt cmake" and you'll find a good tutorial.
Additionally to qmake cmake supports unit testing (use ctest in connection with ADD_TEST() and a dart server) and creating binary packages on all platforms using cpack.
Alex
If you really need to do platform-dependent tests, then I would use CMake. QConf is....weird. It use C++ to write configure tests and it's only used by Psi and QCA. CMake has a larger audience.
In my opinion CMake is a must. AFAIK KDE is switching to CMake since 4.0, so it is bound to be a widespread method. A section about installers would be nice too. Scions is also quite popular, so it might be worth at least mentioning.
As for QMake itself I suggest you also explain some tricks and quirks that come with it - some of them are documented, some explained in the QtCentre wiki and some other can be learned by looking into QMake sources. Of course asking the Trolls (like Harald here) is an option as well :) They are really friendly people, but I'm sure you know that better than I do.
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