On 2/28/25 5:53 PM, Nicolas Arnaud-Cormos wrote:
Embedding into the DLLs doesn't cut it, unfortunately, as Kai already
pointed out. But we could add CMake code that embeds the natvis files
in the user's binaries (as Marcus already wrote).
Here be dragons!
I'm not an expert, but I suspect your natvis license prevent from
integrating into any customer binaries using the free version of Qt...
or at least it's a very gray area.
The natvis files are currently licensed under:
LicenseRef-Qt-Commercial OR GPL-3.0-only WITH Qt-GPL-exception-1.0
The reason for that is most probably that this is the default license
for the vstools repo. I don't see a reason to be that restrictive. We
should maybe treat this as build system file and use commercial+BSD3 instad.
We never continued with this, because we reconsidered and wanted to
add the natvis files to the Qt repositories instead. Here's a deferred
change that does this: https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtbase/
+/560899
What does deferred mean here?
In my book, it usually means "nice to have when someone will have
time", which is basically never ;)
It could mean that we'll resume work on that "when it becomes more
important" or "more people care about this". Looks like the latter
already became a thing.
Interesting, I was wondering if it was possible to do automatic tests of
natvis files... guess it's probably very difficult without instrumenting
Visual Studio itself.
For Qt VS Tools, we have a Squish instance running. One idea would be to
test the debug visualizers with that.
We can probably improve things already by ditching the testing
attempt, but keep in mind that we're dealing with three different
natvis dialects:
- full blown VS natvis
- reduced (or just old?) natvis of cdb
- severely reduced natvis subset of cppdbg for VS Code
The cdb one isn't that important, unless Qt Creator starts to use that.
I would ditch both cdb and cppdbg and focus only on Visual Studio and
cppvsdbg.
That would exclude VS Code users on non-MSVC platforms.
But for starters one could focus on the VS thing.
Cheers,
Joerg
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Jörg Bornemann | The Qt Company
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