#44193: qt: allow side by side installation of qt4-mac and qt5-mac -------------------------------+------------------------ Reporter: mojca@… | Owner: mcalhoun@… Type: enhancement | Status: new Priority: Normal | Milestone: Component: ports | Version: Resolution: | Keywords: Port: qt4-mac, qt5-mac | -------------------------------+------------------------ Comment (by michaelld@…): OK; good discussion that I can follow / parse & I'm glad for it. Given the lateness of me getting to this tonight, I'm going to put my proposals here -briefly- for 1 last round of comments & wait to do the formal commits until Tuesday (morning in US/Eastern preferably). A) Here's what I'm proposing to do tomorrow: 0) commit the minimal patch to allow qt4-mac to install into libexec (just change qt_dir to be "${prefix}/libexec/qt4");[[BR]] 1) commit the proposed (minimal) patch to qt4-mac that allows it to work with 10.11.[[BR]] These will bring qt4-mac into a state where it works on most target OS X versions but especially with 10.11 as well as allowing for parallel installs. It's not perfect, but it gets things moving & does not require more testing/evaluation. We will have enough work getting Qt4 dependent ports working with the parallel build that I don't think we need more things to deal with just right now.[[BR]] 2) rev-bump ports that are known to work with the updated qt4-mac. B) I then propose that we create a qt4-mac-devel port that René owns (via his current email) with me and openmaintainer. He can do lots of awesome things with it (Portfile, patches, main repo, whatever), and folks who are brave enough can use it as a drop-in augmented replacement for qt4-mac (yes?). When features reach a state of acceptance / maturity in qt4-mac- devel, they can be ported to qt4-mac en mass; or, if it works well enough, we just use it instead of qt4-mac. In this manner, we get to test drive René's mods while not burdening folks who use qt4-mac & don't really care about all the cool stuff going on under the hood. C) I further propose that since Qt4 is EOL except for security updates, we just use René Qt4 github repo as the master branch for fixes / patches for qt4-mac-devel. In this way, we can avoid all of the patches that have made qt4-mac so !@#$ difficult to maintain in the past. And, René maintains control over what's in and what's out, with advice from us; and pull requests from us or anybody. I'm guessing that doing all of the above will actually be a 2-step process. The first step is 0 through 2; I don't want to wait any longer to fix qt4-mac on 10.11, and it makes sense to do the parallel install at the same time. The second step will be doing B and C, and whatever changes are required to qt4-mac to allow it and qt4-mac-devel to be hot-swappable replacements; these will probably require a rev-bump to qt4-mac, but I think that's a fair trade-off for getting functionality in place ASAP then making it robust once we've verified that it all works. -- Ticket URL: <https://trac.macports.org/ticket/44193#comment:74> MacPorts <https://www.macports.org/> Ports system for OS X