Hi!

On Tue, 16 Feb 2021 at 11:37, Ville Voutilainen
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 16 Feb 2021 at 15:35, Kai Köhne <[email protected]> wrote:
> > And again, this is not something limited to Qt. Last time I checked, the 
> > executable to run Python 3 on Windows is python.exe, not python3.exe. On 
> > Debian at least it's python3. This hasn't blocked Python from being 
> > perceived as overall beginner friendly ...
>
> Uh.. that seems like an apples-and-oranges comparison. On linux, it's
> expected and conventional that if you install both
> python 3 and python 2, both are available in the usual PATH, neither
> eclipses the other, and you can cd between python 2
> and python 3 projects and run both, without switching environments or
> alternatives in between.

Exactly, and that's because you have both python2 and python3
executables on path.

> On windows, I don't know what's conventional. In many cases, a
> shortcut is used that launches a command prompt
> with the right environment, and using two versions in the same command
> prompt just isn't done.

And again, exactly. So comparing against Python on Windows is, as you
say, and apples-and-oranges comparison.

> > So, I would stick to qmake as canonical name, also in the documentation. We 
> > can mention that it's sometimes called qmake6 on Linux. But forcing 
> > everyone to change their habit and scripts just for the sake of consistency 
> > with a fraction of the users that use a global installation on Linux, and 
> > do not use update-alternatives, is IMO not a good move.
>
> update-alternatives is a long-term system-wide configuration change.
> Changing PATH is a shorter-term user-specific one. That's how I switch
> between compilers, and I wouldn't dream of using update-alternatives
> to switch between them. Especially not
> on multi-user systems, where it's none of my business to change the
> alternative used for a system compiler
> for other people. I *can't* do an update-alternatives on a build
> server, and I *shouldn't*. That doesn't mean that
> a build server installation couldn't have both qt 5 and qt 6 installed
> in a system-wide location.
>
> Switching between qt 5 and qt 6 via update-alternatives is Just Wrong.
> If our approach requires it, our approach
> is broken.

And in fact we can use python (again) as a good example: let the
user-facing binaries have the major version in them. And this time the
comparison is on Linux, where it belongs.

Kai: we the maintainers have been asking for the right solution since
the Qt3 to Qt4 switch. For a developer having to add the "6" after the
tool, while it might be a change, it will pretty sure be
straightforward. And by doing this we fix the issue not only for this
release but for every major release here upon.

Tip: many Linux users expect qmake6 or some other variant to call
qmake. Now it's time to make it official *and* consistent for
everyone.
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