Qt6: Installation story

Business justification

Qt Installer is one of the first tools, users need to use to get started with Qt development. The installer should provide the user with fast, efficient, intuitive, and easy installation experience. Especially important this is for evaluators. We should provide an experience, what evaluators like to use and even recommend to others. Improving the UX, would help our marketing and sales efforts and would improve the ratio of turning evaluators to Qt customers. All Qt users would benefit faster and less error-prone user experience.

What is needed?

We have concentrated on facelifting the existing Qt Installer, but we would need a bigger change. The Installer UI/UX is heavily dependent on the underlying repo model, which means a change in the UI always requires a change in the model. This makes even trivial UI changes, like changing the position of a component in the installer tree, time consuming to implement. To achieve this, we would need the following: 

• clear vision of the installer UI (product management)
• information and decision, whether we would have our own cross-platform installer or could we even use ready-made installers (product management) 
• research task to identify the usability of the current repo model (R&D)
• UI/UX consulting (sub-contractor)
• implementation (R&D)

Known issues  

Installation is not easy and intuitive. In Linux, installer is downloaded from the server, access rights are changed, and the installer is started in the command line. In Windows, developers may install Qt into a folder, whose path name contains white spaces and causes problems. Component selection main line terminology needs to follow our product names and packaging (it is not 'Embedded' but 'Device Creation' etc). 

Moreover, the installer is getting slow as the number of Qt versions increase, it's quite disk space consuming and it becomes more difficult to add new features to it. 

A good reference of issues to be improved can be found in https://intranet.qt.io/display/QTRD/QtIFW+replacement

What are the top priority changes, which should be implemented? Would it be possible to implement the changes in the current installer or re-write a new one?r

 If we wish to evaluate existing package managers, we need to make sure that

• such an installer can resume a download; see https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTIFW-5
• the installer can handle authentication for our commercial releases
• any other UI tweaks we might wish to have can be easily done
• things like launching Qt Creator at the end of installation or jumping into documentation/release notes can be done