I've recently installed Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on my development laptop. Previously I was running 18.04 so this is my first experience of Wayland. I did a clean installation on a new disc. I had relatively few problems reinstalling gitkraken and cloning the repository of my source code from github but when I came to install the Qt libraries this is where my problems started. The on-line installer from the Qt website simply wouldn't run. It just exited silently. I eventually found an old version of the on-line installer executable in a backup of my downloads folder from Ubuntu 18.04 and was able to use this to download and install the same version of the Qt libraries that I was using previously (5.15.0). This is also the same version that I use on my other development machine which runs Windows 10. Keeping the two in step is useful and upgrading too many things at the same time seemed like asking for trouble. I installed the latest versions of Qt Creator (7.0.1) and g++ (11.2.0).
I was then able to build my application and, after a brief search of stack overflow I added "-platform wayland" to the command line arguments setting in Qt Creator but the application crashed almost immediately on start-up with the error "The Wayland connection experienced a fatal error: Protocol error".
Several things made me think this might be a bug in the Qt libraries rather than my application (none of them definitive!):
At the point of application exit, apart from main() there is none of my application code in the call-stack (see below)
My application has been stable for a long time and has survived several operating system, compiler and Qt version changes across two OS families
The fact that the latest Qt on-line installer (itself almost certainly a Qt application) wouldn't run
I downloaded Qt 5.15.12 (the latest Qt 5 version available) and rebuilt my application against that but the result was the same.
The next step is obviously to strip my application right down to something minimal that still shows the problem but before I do I was wondering whether this is something other people have come across when migrating a Qt5 application to Wayland and whether I need to take the bigger step of upgrading to Qt6? The Qt Wiki describes Qt 5.11 as being "stable" with Wayland.
The call stack at the time of the error looks like this:
qt_message_fatal
QMessageLogger::fatal
QtWaylandClient::QWaylandDisplay::checkError
QtWaylandClient::QWaylandDisplay::flushRequests
doActive
QMetaObject::activate
QSocketNotifier::activated
QSocketNotifier::event
QApplicationPrivate::notify_helper
QApplication::notify
QCoreApplication::notifyInternal2
QCoreApplication::sendEvent
socketNotifierSourceDispatch
g_main_context_dispatch
??
g_main_context_iteration
QEventDispatcherGlib::processEvents
QEventLoop::exec
QCoreApplication::exec
main
Many thanks.
It's something to do with QDialog::setMaximumSize. The call to setMaximumSize itself does not crash but if I remove all calls to it the application works fine. Some controls do subjectively seem bigger on Wayland so I wonder if Qt 5 on Wayland crashes if the size of the QDialog contents exceeds the maximum size specified. This certainly doesn't cause a crash in Qt 5 on Windows and didn't in Qt 5 on Ubuntu prior to the switch to Wayland. I think this is a Qt bug but of course it may well be fixed in a later version of Qt and there's an easy enough work-around now I know the cause.
I was using setMaximumSize to allow the dialog to expand dynamically as widgets were added but to prevent the user from making the window any bigger than it needed to be. layout()->setSizeConstraint(QLayout::SetFixedSize); achieves the same thing.
Is it possible to compile a Qt Project on Windows for Linux / Mac?
I am using Qt 5.0.2 with MinGW and Qt Creator.
i'm not saying it is impossible but it would be really hard. g++ could be tricked into generating object files but there are many linux libraries and headers that just don't exist on mingw. Linux apps are best built on linux itself.
For QT 4.* answer is YES, that's possible, I did that ones mainly for 'research purposes' and would not do it again ever.. It takes a lot of time, a lot of hacking bit's and pieces in makefiles, configurations.. There is no ANY practical sense in doing that. It takes 40 minutes to install Linux of your taste on a virtual machine (whatever you prefer) and get proper binaries.
Same applied for MacOSX.. never did it but again I believe it can be done by building a full tool-chain only question what for =))
In our organization we have 1 server with 3 virtual machines that are responsable for cross-platform building. I think that cross-compiling on one real OS may be used only for some kind of learning process, but not for real tasks.
I finally did it with compiling and building it on each OS. It is too much effort doing it on Widnows.
In a nutshell, the question is: I just finished my first application using Qt Creator on a computer running under Linux Ubuntu, now how do I make this available for everyone. Now follows the more detailed version ;)
I must apologize for asking this, I am aware that this question has probably been asked many times and that there is official documentation that I can read. I am just completely new to programming and I am very confused by everything I've read so far. If you are kind enough to help, please assume I know absolutely nothing :)
Here we go: I've just finished designing my first application (a scientific program) with Qt creator on my laptop which runs under Linux Ubuntu. It works fine and I'm very proud of it ;)
Here's what my project consists of: 40 header files, 42 source files, 1 pro file, 1 qrc file, 1 html file and 7 png files. In the code, I use #include for a bunch of fairly standard Qt classes (QWidget, QTextBrowser and so forth, maybe like 40 of those).
Now I'd like to make it available to other people. For Linux and Mac users, I've figured a way to do that: I can compress the folder containing my project, tell them to install Qt on their computer, then download and extract the files on their hard disk, open a terminal in the folder and run
qmake myProject.pro
qmake
make
That seems to work fine (by the way, does it matter that this is not precisely what Qt creator does? The qmake step there is qmake-qt4 myProject.pro -r -spec linux-g++ and the make step is make -w). Now, I assume there is a solution where I don't ask them to download and install something like 200Mo of Qt material. As for Microsoft Windows users, I don't have a clue.
I would be very grateful if you could explain to me in a very concrete way what I need to do. Needless to say, I'll go for the best and easiest solution, I don't need to understand everything about deployment. Many thanks in advance!
Edit: In case that's useful : I've been using Qt Creator 2.5.0 based on Qt 4.8.1 (64 bit), I'm working on a laptop with Ubuntu 12.04 64bits
For Linux and Mac users, I would compile the software for them in 32 and 64bit formats - no-one likes compiling unknown software from source. Obviously keep the source code option for those on more unusual architectures/OSs (and provide a shell script for them that mimics the commands Qt Creator calls!). As Qt runtimes are available from package managers on just about every distro (and come pre-installed on most anyway, KDE requires them for example), by not asking them to compile from source your users will have a much smaller download (if any) and won't require them to download software from a website potentially unknown to them. Of course the best way would be to try to get your software added as a package into the major distros' repositories, but that may take some time to organise.
Compile your software for Windows users for both 32 and 64bit formats. It's generally frowned upon to ask users to download runtime libraries they potentially don't know, and put them into their system32 folder... So most applications bundle all the libraries they need with their application. Qt-based applications are no different, and so put the runtimes into the folder where the executable is. Also it is much more professional to create a proper installer, there are a few free installer applications for Windows, a web search will give you the most popular (I think I saw a thread on SO about it as well).
As you can see the platforms aren't too dissimilar, the main point I would make is: Do not force people to compile from source! The vast majority of people on Earth do not even know what compiling is, so provide for the major arrchitectures/OSs yourself.
Ok, this is indeed a newbish question but I have to take a first step somewhere.
I've just had experience with DevC++ console applications, which means a simple .exe would be produced from the compiling, running from cmd. That was all, you could send the .exe to a gentleman running the same OS and he could run your little program.
What happens with Qt Creator projects, though? I've finally finished my dekstop application, wrote and debugged everything that needed to be done, I sort of have some nice GUI going, everything's working nice but... How do I acually give it to other people that don't have QtC to run it through?
Any guide that covers this?
Deployment
Here are some guides helping you to deploy your application on different platforms:
X11
Windows
Mac OS X
Embedded Linux
Symbian
Installation
I can highly recommend
NSIS
Inno Setup
Distribution
Have a look at this site. Here you can present your application to others and let them download it.
The subject of your question is simple, but I'm sure it will help many people! Your question is a good contribution.
Well, last thing you do is find out dependencies - shared libraries, and squeeze that all into installer. :)
Resources:
Qt has a nice page called Deploying an Application on Windows, as a part of their documentation. So all the dependencies related stuff is covered there.
List of best free installers is available here.
My suggestion is to invest some time in writing a CMake script and then using CPack for the distribution.
Here is a very simple example
http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/BundleUtilitiesExample
with this you are able to deploy a mac application. Then you can also extend it to create Debian or RPM packages!
The CMake mailing list is always a source of useful suggestion.
In windows you probably have to redistribute the Qt DLL with your program, as well as for Mac you have to include Qt libraries in your bundle.
I love applications that are able to update themselves without any effort from the user (think: Sparkle framework for Mac). Is there any code/library I can leverage to do this in a Qt application, without having to worry about the OS details?
At least for Windows, Mac and user-owned Linux binaries.
I could integrate Sparkle on the Mac version, code something for the Linux case (only for a standalone, user-owned binary; I won't mess with distribution packaging, if my program is ever packaged), and find someone to help me on the Windows side, but that's horribly painful.
It is not a complete solution, but a cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) tool for creating packages for auto-updates and installing them is available at https://github.com/mendeley/Update-Installer. This tool does not deal with publishing updates or downloading them.
This was written for use with a Qt-based application but to make the update installer small, standalone and easy to build, the installer uses only standard system libraries (C++ runtime, pthreads/libz/libbz2 on Linux/Mac, Win32 API on Windows, Cocoa on Mac, GTK with fallback on Linux). This simplifies delivering updates which include new versions of Qt and other non-system libraries that your application may depend on.
Before considering this though, I would suggest:
If you are only building for two platforms, consider using standard and well-tested auto-update frameworks for those platforms - eg. Sparkle on Mac, Google's Omaha on Windows or auto-update systems built into popular install frameworks (eg. InstallShield). I haven't tried BitRock.
On Mac, the Mac App Store may be a good option. See https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-16549 though.
On Linux, consider creating a .deb package and a simple repository to host it. Once users have a repository set up, the system-wide software update tools will take care of checking for and installing new releases. The steps for setting up a new repository however are too complex for many new Ubuntu/Debian users. What we did, and also what Dropbox and Google have done, is to create a .deb package which sets up the repository as part of the package installation.
A few other notes on creating an updater:
On Windows Vista/7, if the application is installed system-wide (eg. in C:\Program Files\$APPNAME) your users will see a scary UAC prompt when the updater tries to obtain permissions to write to the install directory. This can be avoided either by installing to a user-writable directory (I gather that this is what Google Chrome does) or by obtaining an Authenticode certificate and using it to sign the updater binary.
On Windows Vista/7, an application .exe or DLL cannot be deleted if in use, but the updater can move the existing .exe/DLL out of the way into a temporary directory and schedule it for deletion on the next reboot.
On Ubuntu, 3rd-party repositories are disabled after distribution updates. Google works around this by creating a cron-job to re-add the repository if necessary.
Shameless plug: Fervor, a simple multiplatform (Qt-based) application autoupdater inspired by Sparkle.
Shameless plug: this a relatively old question, but I thought that it may be useful to mention a library that I created recently, which I named "QSimpleUpdater". Aside from notifying you if there's a newer version, it allows you to download the change log in any format (such as HTML or RTF) and download the updates directly from your application using a dialog.
As you may expect from a Qt project, it works on any platform supported by Qt (tested on Windows, Mac & Linux).
Links:
Website
GitHub repository
Screenshot:
Though it works a bit differently than Sparkle, BitRock InstallBuilder contains an autoupdater written in Qt that can be used independently (disclaimer, I am the original BitRock developer). It is a commercial app, but we have free licenses for open source projects.
I've developed an auto-updater library which works beautifully on Mac OS X, Linux and pretty much every Unix that allows you to unlink a file while the file is still open. The reason being that I simply extracted the downloaded package on top of the existing application. Unfortunately, because I relied on this functionality, I ran into problems on Windows as Windows does not let you unlink an open file.
The only alternative I could find is to use MoveFileEx with the replace on reboot flag, but that is awful.
However, renaming the working directory of the application works on Windows 7 and Windows XP. I haven't tried Windows Vista yet.
I have found WebUpdate to be quite useful, though it's written with the wxWidgets. But don't worry, it's a separate app which handles your updates. The steps to integrate it are pretty simple - just write two XML files and run the updater. And yes, it's cross-platform.
The advantage of it is it will automatically download and unzip/install all you required and not just provide a popup with a notification about a new version and a link to download it. Another thing you can do with it is customizable actions.
Project's main page is here, you can read the docs or take a look at the official tutorial.
The blog post Mixing Cocoa and Qt may solve the problem for the Mac platform.
You can use UpdateNode which gives you all the possibilities to update your software. It's using a cross platform Qt client and is free for Open Source!
UPDATE
Just did some further analysis on that and really like this solution:
Pros:
Free for Open Source!!! Even the client is Open Source: https://github.com/updatenode/unclient
The client is already localized in several languages
Very flexible in terms of updates. You can even update single non-binaries.
Provides additionally a way to display messages though the client.
Ready to use binaries & installer for all common Linux distributions, single Windows binary, as well as installer and a solution for Mac (which I have not tried, as I don't have a Mac)
Easy to use web service, nice statistics and update check is integrated within few minutes
Cons:
I am missing a multi-user management in the online service. Maybe they will do it in future - I will definitely suggest that in their feedback portal
The client is a GUI client only - so, you will need to shrink it down to run without a GUI frontend (maybe only necessary for people like me ;-) )
So, bottom line, as this solution is quite new, I think there is lot of potential here. I will definitely use it in my project and I am looking forward for more from them! Thumbs up!
This is an old question but there is not Squirrel in answers which is BEST SOLUTION , here is what I'm doing in qt 5.12.4 with qt quick "my qml app" you can do this in any other language
I'm doing this in windows there is mac version of squirrel too, I don't know about Linux
download nuget package explorer release
https://github.com/NuGetPackageExplorer/NuGetPackageExplorer/releases
open nuget package explorer and add this directory 'lib/net45' it doesn't matter you have a .net app or not, I did this for my qt application otherwise it won't work.
add all files into this folder specify your version in the metadata
save nupkg file
download squirrel release https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows/releases
add squirrel to windows environment path
open cmd and cd to directory of nupkg file
squirrel --releasify file_name.nupkg -> now inide releases folder, there should be setup.exe file which will install app and other files.
to create new version do 2,3,4,7,8 again if its an update it will create delta file which is only needed file to update, put this files into your service directory for example in updates folder of your website which you need to disable directory browsing in IIS , and to auto-update application you need to call Update.exe which is in parent folder of application root directory appdir/../update.exe --update http://yourserver.com/upates/ after application restart app should start with new version
you can find documentation for squirrel in https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows/blob/develop/docs/getting-started/0-overview.md and nuget package explorer here https://github.com/NuGetPackageExplorer/NuGetPackageExplorer and you can use only nuget.exe too if you don't want to use nuget package explorer which can be used for dynamic generation of versions, which can be download from https://www.nuget.org/downloads
That easy. Now you have auto-update app which will download updates from the server and auto-update app. For more info you can read documentations.
note: for iis uses https://github.com/Squirrel/OldSquirrelForWindows/issues/205
I suggest you read on plugin and how to create and use them. If your application architecture is modular and be split into different plugins. Take a look at Google Auto Update utility http://code.google.com/p/omaha/. We use this.
Thibault Cuvelier is writing a tutorial (in French) to develop an updater. I know the explanations are in French (and everyone is not understanding French), but I think this can be readable with a web translator like Google Translate. With this you will have a cross-platform updater, but you need to write it by yourself.
For what I know, the only part of the updater that is explained in the tutorial, is the file downloading part. In the case this can help you, refer to the tutorial, Un updater avec Qt.
I hope that helps.
OK, so I guess I take it as a "no (cross-platform) way". It's too bad!
I have found a solution that can be automated with built-in self-extracting patches and updates. for windows. I have started using their sdk. take a look at the massive documentation here, https://agersoftware.com/docs/ the sdk is called securesdk and comes with their app, SecureDelta sdk. does a great job on any kind of files, better results than lzma-included delta updaters