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<p style=" margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px; -qt-user-state:0;">> That was VERY informative. This is what I was afraid of. With Windows and OS X even though there are 3 or 4 versions if you build for the earliest one (XP or 10.5) the binary has a really good chance of still running on the latest (Win7 or Lion). With Linux and so many distributions I don't have time to create that many different virtual machines to compile on each and every one. I am a single developer. I think I am going to go the source route and make sure that my software just compiles with the standard packages from each of the distros (Qt 4, HDF5 1.8, Boost and Qwt). The only issue might be Qwt as I still use Version 5 and I think there is a newer version out that I doubt I am compatible with. All else fails I have my own repo for Qwt that is public for anyone to pull from. </p>
<p style=" margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px; -qt-user-state:0;">> I very much want to support Linux in the best way possible. I was hoping for some thing easier but I guess this is just the way it is.</p>
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<p style=" margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px; -qt-user-state:0;">Don't give up just yet! There are other options which might meet your needs. No-one appears yet to have mentioned the LSB (Linux Standards Base) and it is designed to solve problems just like yours. Admittedly, it will take a little bit of (one-time) work, but as someone who has done this with production code at a previous employer, we found it was well worth it. After getting things working, we only had to distribute a single package to cover all linux distributions (yes, even Debian-based ones such as Ubuntu).</p>
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<p style=" margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px; -qt-user-state:0;">The LSB is a standard that all major linux distributions certify to. If you can build your package to be LSB compliant, then one package can be installed on all major linux distributions and you are guaranteed that they will work (well, from a binary compatibility point of view anyway!). In order to build your package as LSB compliant, you need to use the LSB compilers, which are essentially wrappers around the GNU compilers (these wrappers set a few flags to make the GNU compilers behave in certain ways). It can be a bit hard to find info on how to get started building with the LSB. A couple of resources to help get you started would be the linux foundation page for the LSB (its home) and the LSB mailing list:</p>
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<p style=" margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px; -qt-user-state:0;">http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/lsb</p>
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<p style=" margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px; -qt-user-state:0;">https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/lsb-discuss</p>
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<p style=" margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px; -qt-user-state:0;">Don't worry about the stuff dealing with linux distributions being LSB compliant, you are interested in the parts relating to making *application* packages LSB compliant. The first link on the LSB home page for the "LSB Updates: SDK, Checkers, 4.1" should give you a running start.</p>
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<p style=" margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px; -qt-user-state:0;">The main difficulty for you is that some of the libraries you are depending on are not part of the LSB, or the LSB only covers older versions than the ones you are using. But not to worry, you can still build those libraries with the LSB compilers as well and include those libraries as part of your package. Those dependent libraries would be considered private to your package and not seen by anything else on the system, so there's no problem with potentially destabilising the target system or causing unexpected behaviour changes when you supply your own version of these libraries. The LSB standard mandates that your package installs to an area in /opt, not in /usr. For those readers who feel this is "not the linux way", keep in mind that this is a standard that all major linux distributions certify to and support. ;) This isn't a philosophical argument, just a way to meet the needs of the question posed in the original post.</p>
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<p style=" margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px; -qt-user-state:0;">Building those third party libraries with LSB compilers can be a bit tricky. Fortunately for you, I've already posted a set of patches for building Qt 4.7 with LSB 4.0 compilers on the Qt bug tracker, so that should considerably speed up the process for you. The relevant bug report can be found at the following location (make sure you read through all the comments, since these update statements made in the main description of the bug):</p>
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<p style=" margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px; -qt-user-state:0;">https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-16385</p>
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<p style=" margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px; -qt-user-state:0;">The last status of that bug report includes a full set of patches for Qt 4.7.3. I have since changed employers, so I won't be able to continue providing patch updates in the short term.</p>
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<p style=" margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px; -qt-user-state:0;">I would expect Qwt should build with LSB compilers as well, but if not, it might be in my interest to work out what has to be done to make it so. Let me know if you run into problems building Qwt with LSB compilers.</p>
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<p style=" margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px; -qt-user-state:0;">I can't comment on Boost or HDF5, but you might have some luck with those too.</p>
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<p style=" margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px; -qt-user-state:0;">One thing I didn't mention above is that when you build your package as LSB compliant, you only need one dependency to be specified, that being on "lsb". You don't depend on "qt" or "qwt" or anything like that, which is just as well because the names of those packages vary between linux distributions (but the "lsb" package is a mandatory name covered by the LSB spec).</p>
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<p style=" margin-top:0px; margin-bottom:0px; margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px; -qt-block-indent:0; text-indent:0px; -qt-user-state:0;">As a final comment of limited relevance, the work that went into making Qt build with LSB compilers also resulted in making CMake itself buildable with LSB compilers (thanks Brad King!). :)</p>
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