QStandardPaths patching failure

[Ben Cooksley]

Hi all,

As some of you will know, a couple of people have been working on
getting some patches integrated into QStandardPaths upstream in Qt, in
order to allow KDE applications and unit tests to be able to locate
their resources more easily on Windows and OSX. This would aid us both
in a developer and CI capacity.

I'm sorry to report that upstream appears to be completely unwilling
to accept the necessary changes, with environment variables being
categorically ruled out as an option on both OSX and Windows. As a
result, when the CI system deploys for these platforms, it will be
without any form of unit testing for KDE software as the CI system
will be unable to pass along the information necessary to find
resources such as icons, plugins, etc. Leaving them enabled would
essentially break numerous frameworks and applications results on the
CI system, with developers being unable to do anything to correct
this.

In terms of future distribution of our applications on these
platforms, it appears that we will need to make adjustments to how we
install resources to more directly tie into the mechanisms Qt requires
you to use on these platforms. This will likely mean a completely
different folder structure depending on the platform, and will
probably require changes across many codebases within KDE.

For those interested in the discussion, please see
https://codereview.qt-project.org/#/c/103277/ and
https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-44473

I'd like to thank Jeremy, David, Rene and Marko for their work on
this. An extreme pity it hasn't worked out.

Sadly,
Ben