As Qt 5 approaches alpha, it is more and more interesting to try using it outside the comfort of developer machines. For that, packages are needed.

Thanks to vgrade I found the qt-spec-effort project on Gitorious. This git contains a nice script that populates an OBS with the Qt packages. Perfect for my needs. I had to employ some minor tweaking to get things going, so my clone can be found here.

One thing that possibly could affect Qt 5 is the version of XCB, the new X protocol C bindings. When upgrading the existing packages for libxcb and friends I ran into a split package. Apparently, xcb-util was split into five packages (xcb-util, xcb-util-wm, xcb-util-renderutil, xcb-util-image, xcb-util-keysyms), so the packaging turned out to be a bit more tedious than expected. Still, the spec-files are available from the xcb-spec-effort git that I setup. The only consequence of this was that I had to be more specific when specifying dependencies for Qt 5’s qtbase (it is all on Gitorious).

So, now, all I need is a good way to measure and optimize QML performance. The swaplogger tool serves the first purpose (spec file in this clone). Now, all that is left is the optimization part :-)