Chapter 11. Linking and Deployment

After learning about debugging and testing applications using Qt Creator and the Qt Test framework in the previous chapters, we are down to one of the last phases in application development, which is the deployment of applications to the end users. This process itself has many variations and can take quite a lot of different forms depending on the target platform, but one thing they all have in common is the packaging of an application in a way that it can be simply executed in the target platform and without bothering with the dependencies of the application. Remember, not all target platforms (whether it is Windows, macOS, or Linux) have Qt and OpenCV libraries on them. So, if you go on and just provide the users of your application with only the executable of your application, it will most probably not even start executing, much less working correctly.

In this chapter, we are going to tackle exactly that, by learning about the correct way of creating...