Question

Problem background:

I have a Qt/QML Symbian application targeting Qt 4.7.4, that requires a QML Camera component. The current state of Camera component has a serious performance bug, where once initialized, in order to overlay the camera view on the screen, it forces the whole application to “raster” graphics system. Even when the camera element is closed and destroyed the application remains in raster graphics system, and the whole app takes a large performance hit, rendering it almost unusable (scrolling lists, navigating through pages… ). The problem is gone only after the application is closed and restarted again, which is not really helpful.

As it appears this will not be resolved any time soon (it is marked as resolved only for some small subset of devices, which I doubt as I have a fairly high-end symbian device that suffers the same bug), I have to look into alternatives and workarounds.

One plausible workaround idea I have is to create a separate application, one whose only job is to capture the required image, process it and then closes. Currently I can do this by externally calling the native device camera application, but this is not a viable production solution. The main application would then start this second external application and wait for the result.

The question: is this possible with Qt creator? Packaging two different applications, and deploying them with a single deployment unit, such that the user does not have a complicated installation procedure?

Answer 1

I would have liked to solve this problem with QtCreator a few months ago but I failed. I managed to package two different applications into a single sis file by studying the pkg file format and creating a pkg file containing both applications.

It is worth examining the pkg files generated by QMake for each application and studying the pkg file format.

It is possible to get QMake to generate the desired pkg file. See the documentation of variable DEPLOYMENT, especially the part where pkg_postrules is discussed.