preparing program for release

[impeteperry]

I have a small program that I have compiled in Qt4. I am using "designer" for my layout.

In windows I used "installSheild" to setup a program for release.
What and/or where is the procedure for linux. I want to be able to demo the program on Knoppix as well as run in liinux that the Qt4 libraries havd not been loaded.

will the same procedure work for a windows' version?

Thanks for any help.

[Brandybuck]

There is an InstallShield version for Linux, but it isn't widely used. The Linux (and Unix) installation philosophy is much different. Package managers and building from source are used instead. Unfortunately, every Linux distribution is slightly different from the rest, so a package made for one distribution won't always work on another. Because of this, most developers just release the source code, and let the individual distributions handle the packaging issues. You can still create a Knoppix package yourself, but creating a package for every distribution is far too much work, so don't even bother.

If the program is simple enough, and can run with everything in one directory, you might want to just create a "tarball". Statically link the program with Qt, put everything in one directory, then compress it into a tar.gz (tarball) file. Then someone can uncompress it to their home directory and and just click the binary to run. You don't want to do this for a package though, but it is suitable for distributing a prebuilt demo.

[impeteperry]

Thanks for the reply,
It seems to me that I read where there is a Line or lines that I can add to the foo.pro file thal qmake will put all the libraries and othe stuff in the "exe" file so the program doesn't need Qt libraries installed to run. I don't know if I want to install it or not at this time

Thanks

[dimitri]

Then you need to link statically with the Qt libraries. First build Qt 4 as static library (configure -static).

Also read Deploying Applications on Unix/X11 (http://doc.trolltech.com/qq/qq11-unix-deployment.html). it was written for Qt 3 but the idea is there.

[Brandybuck]

Also read Deploying Applications on Unix/X11 (http://doc.trolltech.com/qq/qq11-unix-deployment.html). it was written for Qt 3 but the idea is there.
That article has been updated and is now part of the Qt 4 documentation:
http://doc.trolltech.com/4.1/deployment-x11.html

[elcuco]

There is an open source tool called "auto package" which provides something similar to install shield. I have never used it for packaging, but when I used programs packaged this way, I found it very interesting.

I can also recommend the systems used to distribute Quake4 and Doom3, but I forgot it's name :)
:p