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Quite some time has passed since we released the previous Qt Installer Framework 4.6.1 version in August. This just means that there have been quite comprehensive changes in both Qt Online Installer and Qt Installer Framework. Careful testing of these features has taken its time.
ARM processors are becoming more and more popular on desktop platforms, so pre-built Qt binaries are needed for ARM as well. In the 4.7.0 beta release, we have added support for Linux on ARM. Windows on ARM support will follow a little bit later. The goal is that Qt 6.7 can be installed on both X86_64 and ARM64 architecture computers.
Another big change was to build the installer framework with Qt 6.6.0. This is the first release based on Qt 6. We did not want to migrate to Qt 6 earlier, because there are target platforms supported in Qt 5, which are not supported in Qt 6 anymore. We wanted to allow our users to install Qt into these old platforms as long as possible. We spent quite some time thinking about how we could still support additional platforms in the Qt 6-based installer. However, a feasible solution could not be found. There will be two installers. 4.6.x based on Qt 5 and 4.7 based on Qt 6.
Creation of Offline Installers
As we have not provided users with ready-made offline installers for a long time, there has been a need to create offline installers in the GUI in addition to the CLI. So, this is now possible by just a single button click, as depicted in the image below.
Offline installer generation in the GUI
Other Improvements and Fixes
The progress bar on the Welcome page has frozen for dozens of seconds on 0% in some cases. This has been now fixed.
Admin rights handling during the installer, updater, or uninstaller runs has crashed in some use cases. We have carefully studied the cases and fixed the admin rights handling.
We have also prevented uninstalling components when an error occurs. An error may be caused, for example, that there is an installation process running at the same time. Now modifications to the installation folder are not allowed in Maintenance Tool, when the installation is in progress in the same folder.
The full list of all changes can be read also in the Changelog.
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 on the Qt Downloads page (open source) or in Qt Customer Portal for commercial users. The latest documentation can also be found online.
Online Installer 4.7 beta is available only in Qt Downloads.
Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this release.
