Qt 5.7 cloud part now available

[Timo Jyrinki]

Qt 5.8 was easy enough to add so that's now also available with after:
[qt58]. Note that Qt 5.8 is still under active development. The next
planned step for these upstream Qt cloud parts would be offering
prebuilt binaries to cut down the awful build times. Of course if
you're compiling your app snaps in Launchpad you wouldn't notice that
much, but it's still very much a wanted feature.

In other news since people are curious, there is also a shared runtime
of Qt 5.6.1 + Ubuntu libraries like UI Toolkit to be used by apps for
space savings in certain use cases like devices with space
constraints, currently called "ubuntu-qt-runtime" (name TBD). I have
enough testers already so I don't recommend reaching out for it yet :)
But if you are curious, it is installable from
https://code.launchpad.net/~timo-jyrinki/+snap/ubuntu-qt-runtime/+build/8971
and it works by cutting eg a test application's size from 100MB to
10MB. The current idea is that it would be primarily be used via a
cloud part helper to be created.

-Timo


2016-10-10 17:21 GMT+03:00 Timo Jyrinki <timo.jyrinki at gmail.com>:
> Hi!
>
> I started experimenting with bringing upstream Qt as is as a cloud
> part. I can happily announce an early let's say "alpha" version of it
> is working and available with "after: [qt57]".
>
> This is not the "qt-ubuntu" I've a vision of as being available via
> content interface, but rather building upstream Qt as part of your
> app. This is only worth considering if you absolutely require a newer
> Qt than what is available in Ubuntu (5.5 in Ubuntu 16.04, 5.6 in
> Ubuntu 16.10, 5.7 somewhere Jan-Feb in Ubuntu 17.04).
>
> For fun, you can try out a dummy QML test app (C++ backend included though) by:
>
> sudo snap install --edge timostestapp2
> timostestapp2
>
> Mind the missing font for Chinese characters, it's not a bug, just a
> font not staged :) What it's really about is that it is a simple
> application that happens to bundle and uses upstream's to-be-released
> Qt 5.7.1 built with the cloud part.
>
> Included Qt modules: Qt 3D, Qt Bluetooth, Qt Base (Core, Gui etc), Qt
> Declarative, Qt Tools, Qt Web Channel, ... and a lot more, but _not_:
> qtwebengine, qtwebview, qtwebkit. Also no Ubuntu UI Toolkit yet, we
> haven't started testing it with Qt 5.7 yet.
>
> You can use the snapcraft.yaml, launcher and modified parts/plugins
> from https://github.com/tjyrinki/timostestapp2. Modified autotools
> plugin is for building Qt (it doesn't seem to fetch that from the
> cloud part, that would be nice), and modified qmake plugin is for
> building your app. No CMake plugin or such yet, this is very much
> "yay, it runs now!!" first version done in-between all my other tasks.
>
> -Timo