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Qt Installer Framework (IFW) 4.1 has been released today. We have also released Qt Online Installer 4.1 and Qt Maintenance Tool 4.1, which now use the new IFW.
There are several new features and improvements:
- Commercial customers are able to create offline installers using the online installer.
- The user experience and graphical appearance have been improved.
- The command line interface contains improvements, making it more convenient to use.
Look at ChangeLog for all the details.
Offline installer generation - technology preview
Offline installer generation has been a time-consuming task for our packaging team and it is challenging to create an installer, which is suitable for all Qt users. Some offline installer users think its binary size is too large, because it contains too many components. Other users think it lacks many useful Qt components. These are the reasons, why we decided to allow Qt commercial users to create their own offline installers using the command line interface. In addition to Qt component repos, it's possible to add customer-specific repositories as well. This allows customers to customise the offline installer content exactly for their needs.
For example, an offline installer for Qt 5.15.2 can be created easily with the following command.
qt-unified-linux-x64-4.1.0-online.run --root "/home/user/my_dir"
--offline-installer-name "my_installer" create-offline qt.qt5.5152.gcc_64
User experience and graphical appearance
The palette colours have been updated to improve the text readability, keyboard focus and mouse hover indication. The updated palette is less bright, so the contrast between the dark background and texts is not such large. This also makes texts easier to read.
There have been issues with the image scaling with high-DPI. The Qt logo and product images support high-DPI scaling, making the UI appearance much better.
The license list and license details in the LicenseAgreementPage are now re-sizeable by the user, which improves the readability of the license text.
A component in the component tree can be moved to another position. Previously, there was 1-to-1 mapping between the repo structure and the component tree.
One improvement is also that the installer exists, when waiting for user input in the command line, but there is no TTY. Earlier the installer froze and waited for user input as long as manually closed.
Command line interface
Command line interface users can easily filter packages using regular expressions.
Higher verbosity level has been added to allow users to print extra archive information.
Where to get the IFW and the installer?
Precompiled binaries for the Installer Framework can be downloaded from Qt Online Installer, sources and binaries can be found also in Qt Download page (open source) or in Qt Account for commercial users. The latest documentation can also be found online.
The new installer is available in Get Qt and in Qt Account for commercial users. Maintenance Tool is updated using the existing installation(s) Maintenance Tool.
