Qt 5 Fedora 21 packages

Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler at chello.at
Thu Oct 16 14:44:51 UTC 2014


Rex Dieter wrote:
> * there's a developer tool 'qtchooser' that allows users to switch between
> default Qt developer environments.  For the Qt5 qmake case,
> $ qtchooser -qt=qt5 -run-tool=qmake
> qtchooser is a little controversial (not universally endorsed by the kde-
> sig), so currently it is not recommended to rely on it in any fedora
> package builds.

The reason I (and last we discussed this, also Than Ngo) don't endorse 
qtchooser is that it is IMHO the entirely wrong approach: What Qt version to 
use is a property of the project you're trying to build, not of your system 
or your user account. It shouldn't be the person building a project to 
decide what version of Qt to build it against (where usually only one will 
actually work), but the project's build setup.

To be clear, using -run-tool as in Rex Dieter's example:
qtchooser -qt=qt5 -run-tool=qmake
will only work for qmake, where you can also just run qmake-qt5 directly and 
not use qtchooser at all. For other build systems, which run tools more than 
once and want to run just "moc" and "uic", if you use qtchooser, you 
actually need to select the Qt version user-account-wide (eww!).

And the same effect as qtchooser can be had with the simple:
export PATH="%{_qt5_bindir}:$PATH"
which also has the advantage of only affecting that particular shell, and 
thus not break concurrent builds using other Qt versions. (And if you REALLY 
want to set it user-account-wide, that's what ~/.bash_profile is for.) 
Therefore, I see no reason whatsoever to even ship qtchooser in Fedora at 
all (as Rex Dieter is now doing, over my and Than's objections), let alone 
support it.

It is really unfortunate that upstream decided to promote this broken 
"solution" instead of officially renaming the binaries to suffixed versions 
as we distributors have been doing for years.

        Kevin Kofler



More information about the devel mailing list