[KDE/Mac] QStandardPaths on OSX and Windows (Re: An interesting read, perhaps...)

[Ben Cooksley]

On Sat, Apr 23, 2016 at 9:42 PM, David Faure <faure at kde.org> wrote:
>> See, that's an added benefit of my ports and the accompanying Qt5-KDE build. It has a QSP patch that allows the class to be switched into an XDG-compliant mode that also makes it possible to run the (unit) tests. I had not yet considered to make the testing mode bit unconditional.
>> There's a long-standing Qt bug report created after our initial attempt to get a QSP patch into Qt. The consensus we reached at the time was that there is a valid use case for non-native (e.g. XDG-compliant) QSP locations, and that we'd submit another patch ("WIP" style) after we'd been able to test it in the wild. (At the time the whole discussion was theoretical.) I'm also in on-and-off contact with David (CC'ing) about the implementation.
>
> I am still very much against a QSP patch that we don't apply upstream, or a #define hack.

I concur with this. Patches just make things more difficult to
maintain, and the CI system requires quite a bit of regular effort due
to the changing nature of our builds.

>
> The best solution I can see until now is adding support (in QSP) for env vars ($QT_, not $XDG_)
> and/or for defining paths in qt.conf (as the kde-windows guys started), both of which
> would help OSX and Windows.

Last time I recall Thiago being absolutely adamant that the variable
would have to be a XDG_ one not a QT_ one (despite the fact that XDG_
vars are a fish out of water on anywhere but Linux/*BSD's). Do you
think we'll be able to get past him this time?

>
> The env vars would solve it for the CI, while I assume that qt.conf is a better solution
> for end users (at least on Windows). On Mac I still don't get how it's supposed to magically
> work, if env vars are not the way and the install prefix is configurable.

The eV now owns a Mac, so we can probably get you access to that to
play around with builds.
Lack of time, and the machine's propensity to go to sleep on itself
which we haven't been able to resolve has blocked any progress on CI
there though.

I've no idea what would be the best way to deploy our applications on
OSX to be honest....

In terms of Windows, if we restructure how we put together install
prefixes to match how Qt looks for things we probably don't even need
a qt.conf file there.

>
> I can't easily do these myself (wrong platform), but maybe in Randa we can.
>
> --
> David Faure, faure at kde.org, http://www.davidfaure.fr
> Working on KDE Frameworks 5
>

Cheers,
Ben