Some welcome news for all Qt on Maemo developers out there: Nokia intends to deploy the currently in Beta Qt 4.6 to all devices via software update — most probably already with the next major update PR1.2. Currently, Qt 4.6 (available from extras-devel) is completely optified and resides in /opt/qt4-maemo5. That will change with PR1.2, where it will move to the rootfs, replacing the community-supported Qt 4.5. What does this mean for Qt applications?

  • Qt 4.6 applications: If all goes well, nothing needs to be done. Deployed applications should pick up the libraries in /usr. You might need to edit your build scripts so they won’t look in /opt/qt4-maemo5/bin if you’re using qmake.
  • Qt 4.5 applications: This one is trickier. The Maemo5-specific parts in Qt 4.6 are neither API nor ABI compatible with the ones in Qt 4.5. This means that you’ll need at least a recompile, and probably also do source code modifications if you’re doing anything Maemo5-specific. Qt 4.5 applications on device will stop working until there is a Qt 4.6-based update available.

So all you Qt 4.5 users out there, install libqt4-maemo5-dev in scratchbox and start porting. :)

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