On Saturday, 22 January 2022 10:41:50 PST Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer wrote: > Keeping the distros able to use whatever baseline is indeed a first > good step, but I'm also thinking about proprietary apps that might be > using tQtC's build for their offerings. We used this very same machine > with Zoom meetings for our kids' school meetings while they couldn't > go to school due to COVID. It proved very useful.
That's an interesting and good point. It used to be possible to distinguish a commercial build from an open source one back in Qt 3 and 4 days by using the "strings" command and searching for the strings that were added by configure during the initial build. I think that changed part-way through Qt 4 and by 4.8, which is the last release I was still at Nokia for, the binaries were indistinguishable (evaluation binaries were different). I expect that most of those tools are therefore simply using whatever binaries they obtained from The Qt Company and didn't rebuild from source. I think this is how we at Intel do for the installers for the oneAPI SDK on Linux and macOS (the Windows installer got rewritten a few years ago). Open Source tools probably just ship what they got from download.qt.io. Makes things much simpler... which is also part of the reason why I want to raise the minimum and do multi-arch. So if my proposal had been in effect for those releases, it's quite likely the tools wouldn't have run on your 13+-year-old computer. But it isn't. We're talking about the next release, 6.4. There won't be any tools built with it until the second half of this year, and commercial customers may even want to wait for the LTS release after that. > I don't know if the linker capability in using the right library > version can be used in these specific cases, but if somehow it could > be done it would be just wonderful. It can be, it's a matter of our deciding what the minimum and other optimisation options are. On Windows, with MSVC, there's no question to be answered. It's only the baseline. On Windows with either of the MinGW-capable compilers, we can choose the minimum, but there's no option for runtime selection. In either case, since Microsoft isn't interested in providing the tools to make code run fast in their OS, I say we agree and keep on wasting CPU. On Linux, we can have the multiple versions. I proposed a minimum of v2 and an option of v3, but we can always choose v1+v2+v3. But I really want v2 and v3 for the critical libraries. On macOS, the minimum today is already v2, but I am proposing raising it to v3 because we no longer support the OSes that supported v2 CPUs. -- Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com Software Architect - Intel DPG Cloud Engineering _______________________________________________ Development mailing list Development@qt-project.org https://lists.qt-project.org/listinfo/development