Barrier

As part of my work on the Barrier project, we needed a way to build it with the [Qt installer]from an online CI/CD service. On some platforms, such as Appveyor, Qt may be preinstalled. But on some other platforms such as Azure Pipelines, Qt may not be pre-installed. Nor on Travis. Nor on CircleCI. For Linux and macOS, there is a saving grace. The Qt libraries can be installed headlessly from their operating system repositories such as apt or brew. But this luxury does not exist as well on Windows. While Chocolatey does offer some Qt packages, they tend to ancient or non-official.

There is a toolkit called CuteCI that let you use the Qt Installer and script the GUI headlessly. It’s janky and big though. Additionally, to pin versions, you must download 3 to 5 GB of Qt Installer to install a pinned version of Qt.

So, I found this: https://lnj.gitlab.io/post/qli-installer/

Apparently it’s possible to mimic the Qt Installer from a Python script.

To save it from possible bit-rot, I forked it to GitHub. I added parallel downloading, Windows support, and a CI system. I pushed Azure-Pipelines and each commit could cause 100 jobs to run. Across all the various platforms. Azure Pipelines did not break a sweat.

CuteCI is still extremely useful if you must use the official installer with official support. But the speeds with my fork were insane. It would normally take many minutes to install Qt with CuteCI. My QLI-Installer fork? 10 or 20 seconds.

But it turns out there’s an even better installer than mine!

https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall/

aqtinstall

• Classy reusable Python structure
• On PyPi. You can do pip install aqtinstall and install aqtinstall for immediate use.

This is also another fork of qli-installer. The CI system was a in a bit of a sorry state though. So I contributed matrix generated jobs to test aqtinstall across Mac, Windows, and Linux. @miurahr was able to dial down the installation and testing madness too and ramp it up in some places. Actual Qt applications are built to test if aqtinstall work. Additionally, there was the insight that mobile platforms generally always require the latest Qt version.

So, if you want a fast and lightweight headless Qt installer that installs from Qt Mirrors and is continually tested, use aqtinstall!

This was one of those adventures where you find a problem and it snowballs from there.

As part of my work on the Barrier project, we needed a way to build it with the Bonjour SDK from an online CI/CD service. Bonjour is used by Barrier to discover other barrier hosts on the same network. On Windows, the SDK files are needed. Other platforms natively come with the library or similar APIs already preinstalled.

But there’s an issue. The SDK is behind a login wall on Apple’s site. Rehosting it might be possible but it might violate some agreement within the installer. Luckily, the sources are open and are under very permissive licenses.

To save some work, I reused the XBMC project’s fork and made my fork of the SDK. I didn’t change any of XBMC’s changes, if any. I added a CI system to build the necessary libraries in the same manner that Apple did.

So, if you need a free, Cloud CI system accessible Apple Windows Bonjour SDK, look at the releases in my repo! The library files are there and users can fork my build to build the stubs their own way as well.

This was one of those adventures where you find a problem and it snowballs from there.

I wanted to use barrier which is a tool for sharing mouses between computers. It is a fork of Synergy, which had gone commercial.

So, I noticed on their GitHub repo that the builds for various platforms was inconsistent. OK, maybe I can help fix their CI systems.

More worringly, there was some Appveyor CI system configured. It was not configured with the appveyor.yml method and the build process was non-transparent. It was also failing.

My current CI system of choice for open source projects is Microsoft’s Azure Pipelines. For open source projects on GitHub, they’ll provide 10 parallel jobs of Mac, Linux, and Windows. Mac and Windows usually only show up as premium options or are severely rate-limited. As far as I can tell, whatever cluster Microsoft has created for their service, it’s really not limited by capacity.

The good news is that they were fans of it and I was able to move them. It’s still a work in progress. The work done here has draw in some general “improve the ecosystem” enhancements which I will elaborate on in future posts.