When packaging different Qt versions for Linux distributions (or any
distribution with a common bin dir), Qt tools cannot be installed to
/usr/bin, because the executable names of the different Qt versions
clash.
To solve this conflict, our recommendation is to install Qt's tools to
/usr/lib/qt6/bin and to create versioned symlinks to user-facing tools
in /usr/bin.
User-facing tools are tools that are supposed to be started manually by
the user. They are marked in Qt's build system. Distro package
maintainers can now configure with
-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr
-DINSTALL_BINDIR=/usr/lib/qt6/bin
-DINSTALL_PUBLICBINDIR=/usr/bin
and will find a file called user_facing_tool_links.txt in the build
directory after the cmake run. Nothing will be installed to
INSTALL_PUBLICBINDIR.
Each line of user_facing_tool_links.txt consists of the installation
path of a user-facing application followed by a space and the versioned
link name in INSTALL_PUBLICBINDIR.
Example content:
/usr/lib/qt6/bin/qmake /usr/bin/qmake6
To actually create the versioned symlinks, the content of this file can
be fed to ln like this:
xargs ln -s < build-dir/user_facing_tool_links.txt
Or the package maintainer may decide to do something completely
different as suits their needs.
This patch adds the USER_FACING argument to qt_internal_add_tool to mark
tools as user-facing. In addition, every Qt created by
qt_internal_add_app is treated as user-facing.
The only tool this patch marks as user-facing in qtbase is qmake.
Pick-to: 6.1
Fixes: QTBUG-89170
Change-Id: I52673b1c8d40f40f56a74203065553115e2c4de5
Reviewed-by: Kai Koehne <kai.koehne@qt.io>
Reviewed-by: Shawn Rutledge <shawn.rutledge@qt.io>
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