Review Request 127288: Add all required plugin paths in QCoreApplication, instead of relying on environment variable

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

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https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/127288/
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(Updated March 5, 2016, 4:36 p.m.)


Status
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This change has been discarded.


Review request for kdewin.


Repository: emerge


Description
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For some reason, an emerge build will install Qt plugins not in just one, but in three separate directories (KDEROOT/plugins, KDEROOT/lib/plugins, KDEROOT/plugin). I have not investigated why this is the case, or how that could be changed. However, I assume that may not be trivial.

To make applications work in that setup, Qt needs to be informed of the plugin paths. Since qt.conf supports only a single path, that cannot be used, for this. Rather, emerge sets the QT_PLUGIN_PATH environment variable. While this works, it also makes it difficult to deploy any application. In fact, currently, a MinGW compiled, NSIS-packaged app will not run at all, because Qt can't find the windows platform plugin. (I do seem to remember, but have not tried, again, that an MSVC-compiled application was not affected by this, for some reason). Copying the platform-plugin to KDEROOT/bin would work around this, but Qt would still not find any other plugin, then.

Clearly, installers _could_ be adjusted to set QT_PLUGIN_PATH on the target system. However, this could interfere badly with parallel installations of Qt/KF5, and it would prevent nice-to-have features such as being able to move an installed KF5 application to a different path (e.g. on a thumb drive), or in fact moving an entire emerge tree.

Long story short, the only way I can see to support all required plugin paths without the need for QT_PLUGIN_PATH, is to patch them into QCoreApplication, which is what this diff does. After a certain grace-period, it would also make sense to remove the corresponding init code from EmergeSetupHelper.py.


Diffs
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  portage/libs/qt5/qtbase/qtbase-pluginpaths.py PRE-CREATION 
  portage/libs/qt5/qtbase/qtbase.py 3331952 

Diff: https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/127288/diff/


Testing
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- Built qtbase from scratch on MinGW.
- Packaged RKWard and deployed it on a separate system, successfully.
- Also deployed kate, and verified that it can find its plugins.
- Renamed KDEROOT and started applications in it, successfully, too.

Note that I tested with qt 5.5, only. Importantly, I did not test with 5.6 (or 5.4), altough emerge will (try to?) apply the patch, there, too.


Thanks,

Thomas Friedrichsmeier

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