Is the answer to always build your own?

[CandL]

Greetings:

I am struggling with the Qt development environments lack of binary consistency. By this I mean what you can down load as binary packages, are often incompatible.

Let’s take what I would consider reasonable development environment. It would consist of


-Qt core framework
-QtCreator
-QtCreator Plugins

QWT, some nice extra widgets
SVN, version control
Doxygen
-Additional libraries

QWT

And for consistency we say all of these are current version.

Now I add a platform and compiler, let’s say Win7, MSVS 2012, 64 bit. The chances of finding binaries to “complete the set” are not high. So certainly I could always build my own from the source repositories, but let’s face it that is not a trivial task. And once you do build your own compatible suite, in 6 months you get to do it again as new versions come out.

I am probably just whining , just wondering what other folks do?

- Do you pair up with other trusted developers and share
- Lone wolf it, and build it all yourself
- Not use things because they are too much work.
- Is there a secret stash of binaries , I know of :


o http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingwbuilds/files/external-binary-packages/Qt-Builds/
o http://sourceforge.net/projects/qtx64/?source=directory

Frankly the Qtx64 repository seems the most promising for my needs.

So what do you do?

Regards
Carl

[wysota]

I don't understand why you'd want to have QtCreator and QtCreator plugins built with the same compiler and Qt version as the Qt release you are using. It is kind of obvious that you can use Qt Creator with more than one Qt release so there wouldn't be a point in having a separate Creator build for different Qt builds.

[CandL]

If I understand correctly the QTCreator plugin for QWT has to be binary compatible with the version of QtCreator. ( a dll/shared library issue )
So on my platform my that means I have:

64 bit MSVS 2012 versions of QWT libraries/dlls for the code I want to distrib
32 bit MSVS 2010 versions of the QWT dll's to load into QtCreator

It has been my experience that mixing "bitness" and compiler versions leads to dll (shared lib) hell.

Am I missing something?

Thanks for the reply.

[wysota]

Creator needs its plugins to be built with binary compatible tool chain but you only need to build a particular plugin once and you can continue to use it for years. Plugin authors can provide their plugins in binary versions compatible with Creator on popular platforms. This has nothing to do with plugins you build your apps against. These need to be rebuilt whenever you want to use a newer version of the plugin or when you upgrade Qt.