Only one qt version on the Ubuntu Desktop iso?

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Mar 18, 2016 at 03:26:53PM -0400, Michael Hall wrote:
> I know that appmenu-qt technically depends on qt4 being installed, but
> if it will only be used by a qt4 app, and such an app would itself
> depend on the qt4 packages, would there be any harm in making appmenu-qt
> just *not* depend on qt4 packages itself?

This kind of thing is indeed technically possible, but IME it's risky:
if appmenu-qt should find itself with shared library linkage that
requires a newer version of the library (which could happen for reasons
as innocuous as a rebuild, if Qt were to change in certain kinds of
ways), then it would be easy to end up with an appmenu-qt that required
a newer version of Qt than was depended on by the applications in
question and thus would fail to start.

I guess the risk of this is probably low in this particular case since
Qt 4 isn't in particularly active development, but my concern would be
that this kind of trick has a habit of being copied into contexts where
it might be riskier despite looking innocuous.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]