Recently, I have successfully migrated my Qt4 application to Qt5. In fact, the application builds and runs on a development machine using the pre-built binary Qt5 libraries from the qt-opensource-linux-x64-5.3.1 distribution.
Because my app needs to be compliant with the LGPL 2.1 license, the linking to Qt5 must be dynamic. (So I can**not** link to Qt statically!)
My problem is deployment of this application. I just can’t come up with a package with all the sharable libraries, which would run across existing Linux distributions.
I can tolerate the requirement that the users need to install Qt5 themselves from the qt-opensource-linux-x64-5.3.1 binary. In fact, this would ensure even stricter compliance with LGPL 2.1. So, I can assume that the compatible Qt5 libraries are installed and available on the host machine (although I don’t know if I can assume a specific directory for Qt installation)
However, it’s not clear to me how to package my application to run on the host machine. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
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Answer
I thought that other people with a similar problem would be interested what I ended up doing. So, I experimented some more with the simplest for me dynamic linking of the standard pre-build binary Qt5 shared libraries. It turned out that I could come up with a distribution that worked on the following Linux distros: CentOS 7 64-bit, Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit, and Slackware 14.1 64-bit with KDE desktop. The trick was not to include all the dependencies shown by the ldd command. Instead, my binary distribution contains only the following files:
+-platforms/ | +-libqxcb.so +-libicudata.so.52 +-libicui18n.so.52 +-libicuuc.so.52 +-libQt5Core.so.5 +-libQt5DBus.so.5 +-libQt5Gui.so.5 +-libQt5PrintSupport.so.5 +-libQt5Widgets.so.5 +-qm +-qm.sh
Where, qm is the application executable and qm.sh is the bash script for launching the application. The script looks as follows:
#!/bin/sh
dirname=`dirname $0`
tmp="${dirname#?}"
if [ "${dirname%$tmp}" != "/" ]; then
dirname=$PWD/$dirname
fi
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$dirname
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
$dirname/qm "$@"
The application (qm) does not have any plugins and uses only the basic Qt widget library.
I should perhaps add that I was using the binary qt-opensource-linux-x64-5.3.1 distribution:
I hope this is helpful.