QuaZip 1.X Migration

QuaZip 0.x -> 1.x migration guide

This guide contains important information mostly for package maintainers, although it can also be useful for developers as well.

TL;DR

QuaZip 1.0 is supposed to be installed in parallel with 0.x, not replace 0.x. Package maintainers should keep it in mind. The developers should switch to 1.0 in their new releases if they use CMake and/or want new features (although there are only few).

What happened in 1.0

QuaZip 1.0 introduced some important changes:

• modern CMake support was introduced;
• include paths and binary names were changed;
• qmake support was ditched completely.

This change was intended, thoroughly discussed and planned. The reasons for this change were:

• CMake support was a mess because at that time I didn't understand it at all, and was just blindly accepted all CMake-related PRs and patches, which lead to numerous inconsistencies between qmake and CMake builds;
• maintaining both qmake and CMake support in a consistent manner would be next to impossible, as CMake installs some metadata that is very useful, and there is no easy way to generate it with qmake;
• old CMake style is a mess in itself, while modern CMake, even if not at all easy to learn, at least leads to consistent, clean and easy to use (for the users of the library) configuration files.

It was thus impossible to make 1.0 a drop-in replacement for 0.x. Specifically, since 0.x has this qmake/CMake inconsistency (that even changed between versions in an unreasonable manner), it wouldn't be possible to make 1.0 both consistent and 0.x-compatible. Consistency was chosen over compatibility.

To avoid possible conflicts with 0.x, however, it was decided to make 1.0 co-installable with 0.x, by using different include paths and binary names. Binary names had to be changed anyway because they were inconsistent for qmake and CMake, and made no sense at all.

The differences

QuaZip 0.x uses this “scheme”:

• the includes went either to include/quazip or include/quazip5 depending both on qmake/CMake and Qt4/Qt5 usage (only the CMake+Qt5 combination would yield quazip5);
• the binary base name was either quazip or quazip5, again, depending on qmake/CMake and Qt4/Qt5 choice;
• the CMake config files were installed only when building with CMake;
• the CMake package name was QuaZip (for Qt4) or QuaZip5 (for Qt5);
• the CMake target name was the same as the binary name.

QuaZip 1.x uses this scheme:

• the includes go to include/QuaZip-QtX-Y/quazip, where include is the installation prefix include path (/usr/include or something), X is the major version of Qt, and Y is the full version of QuaZip, e. g. include/QuaZip-Qt5-1.0/quazip;
• the binary base name is quazipZ-qtX, where Z is the major version of QuaZip, e. g. libquazip1-qt5.so.1.0.0;
• the CMake package name is QuaZip-QtX, e. g. QuaZip-Qt5;
• the CMake target name is QuaZip::QuaZip.

This can't possibly conflict with any crazy 0.x setup, no matter qmake or CMake. CMake users get the easy modern CMake way (find_package(QuaZip-Qt5), target_link_libraries(... QuaZip::QuaZip)) of using QuaZip, and includes can be either in the #include <quazipfile.h> or in the #include <quazip/quazipfile.h> style (which some qmake users used), as both include/QuaZip-QtX-Y and include/QuaZip-QtX-Y/quazip include paths are added by default. This ensures source compatibility between 0.x and 1.x without any annoying search-and-replace.

The intended use

QuaZip 1.0 should be installed along with 0.x. Whatever applications were built with 0.x should continue to happily use 0.x. When application developers decide so, they should switch to QuaZip 1.0 in their new releases (and preferably switch to CMake as well).

Package maintainers should not consider 1.0 an upgrade from 0.x, but rather an independent package, pretty much the same way as Qt4 and Qt5 are separate packages. The same goes for future major versions such as 2.0, whenever they are released. Or at least that's the current plan.