Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Kits But Were Afraid to Ask - Technology Portal

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3/24/2015

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Kits But Were Afraid to Ask

So if you are new to QtCreator the first thing that freaks you out will be the concept of Kits. Yes it does look complicated, big and you might want to ask why do I need this.
 

Right, let’s take few steps back and look at the bigger picture.

Most programmers start their hobby or carrier with basic (not that one) pc programming. You have the compiler and libraries on your machine, you start hacking around with your code and once you think it will pass at least the syntax check you go to the terminal, compile the code and be happy when you see the binary executable. If it runs without segfaults then you start to gain confidence and you are the happiest kid on Earth once the program does what you coded it for.
That is a fairly simple and common scenario, still it has all the components what actually make an SDK. And i guess you know that in the SDK, the K stands for Kit.
Let’s continue with this thinking. You want to show the program to your friends. That is nothing strange, even coders are social beings. If your program is using dynamically linked libraries from the system then your friends need a bit of luck to have the very same system libraries on their machine as you have on yours. Not to mention that you compiled your program for one specific processor architecture and nothing guarantees that your friends have the same architecture as you had.
So, we are safe and good as long our program stays on our computer but trouble with libraries, binary compatibility and processor architecture will pop up when we want to move our program around without recompiling it again. And imagine, we are still talking about PC to PC porting. Let’s raise the bar.
How does it go when you want to write an application for a mobile device? Most likely your computer is an x86 based PC and these days most mobile devices have some sort of ARM processor. So, here we go, our native local compiler what made us so happy just few paragraphs back is now obsolete and we will need a compiler what can produce an ARM binary for the specific device. It could be armv6, armv7 or whatever exotic ARM processor your target device is built with. Good, we now have a compiler but our code is still using a bunch of libraries. In the Ubuntu world and specially with the ultimate convergence on our roadmap this part of the story is a bit easier and will get even better soon. But still if your PC is running the LTS Ubuntu release (14.04 right now) you do not necessarily expect the same libraries and header files being present on your machine as on a target device what is on 15.04 or even newer.
I guess at this point many would say with a disappointed tone that after you learned that your good old compiler is obsolete now all your locally installed development libraries and header files are useless too. Think of Borat saying “nice”.
Okay, so we are left without compiler, libraries and header files. But they should come from somewhere, right?
And that is where the Kits come into the picture. The official definition of the QtCreator Kits sure sounds a bit academic and dry, so let’s skip it. In short, Kits are the set of values that define one environment, such as a device, compiler, Qt version, debugger command, and some metadata.
I love bicycling so I use cycling analogies whenever it is possible. Imagine that you are in the mood to have a ride downhill in the forest. You will take your mountain bike, knee and elbow pad, lots of water, some snacks and your clothes what take dirt better, a massive helmet and your camera. If you just cycle to your office you take your city bike, lighter helmet and you put on regular street wear. Different target, different set of equipment. How cool it would be just to snap your finger and say out loud “ride to the city”  and all the equipment would just appear in front of you.

That is exactly what happens when you have Kits set up in your QtCreator and you are building your application for and running them on different targets.
QtCreator is an IDE and developers who choose to work with IDEs do expect a certain level of comfort. For example we do not want to resolder and rewire our environment just because we want to build our project for a different target. We want to flip a switch and expect that the new binaries are made with a different compiler against a different set of libraries and headers. That is what QtCreator’s target selector is for. You simply change from the LTS Desktop Kit to the 15.04 based armhf target and you have a whole different compiler toolchain and API set at your service.
At this point Kits looks pretty and easy. You might ask what is the catch then. Why IDEs and SDKs do not come with such cool and well integrated Kits? Well there is a price for every cool feature.  At this moment each Kit in ready for action state is about 1.7GB. So kits are big and the SDK does not know what Kits you want to use. What means is that if we want to install all kits you might use the SDK would be 8-10GB easily.

Why kits are so big and can they be made smaller?

That is a fair question I got very often. First of all, the kits are fully functional chroots in the case of the Ubuntu SDK. It means that other than the compiler toolchain we have all the bells and whistles one needs when entering a chroot. Just enter the click chroot and issue the dpkg -l command to see that yes, we do have a full blown Ubuntu under the hood. In our SDK model the toolchain and the native developer tools live in the click chroots and these chroots are bootstrapped just as any other chroot. It means that each library, development package and API is installed as if it were installed on a desktop Ubuntu. And that means pulling in a good bunch of dependencies you might not need ever. Yes, we are working on making the Kits smaller and we are considering to support static kits next to the present dynamic bootstrapped kits.
Alright, so far we have covered what Kits are, what they contain. The most important question is do you need to care about all of these? Do you need to to configure and set up these kits yourself. Luckily the answer to these questions is no.
In the Ubuntu SDK these Kits are created on the first start of the SDK and set up automatically when a new emulator is deployed or a new device is plugged in. Of course you can visit the builder chroots under the Ubuntu and Build & Run sections in the dialog what opens with the Tools->Options… menu. But most of the application developers can be productive without knowing anything about these. Of course understanding what they are is good and if you are into development tools and SDKs then it is fun to look behind the curtains a bit.

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