This application needs simple deployment with all dependencies packed in. Many projects have done this, including Zoom, VirtualBox etc.

An alternative way would be to do a static build, but that's a bad option for three main reasons:

• Building static Qt from scratch is a pain, and time-consuming
• Possible LGPL licensing issues
• QML files, icons and other resources would still be separate files (unless we hard-code them via rcc — Qt resource compiler)

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Some useful tools:

• https://github.com/linuxdeploy
• https://github.com/probonopd/linuxdeployqt
• https://code.qt.io/cgit/qt/qttools.git/tree/src

This is a proposal to move the application's entrypoint (a.k.a. main()) from Rust with Cargo build system to C++ with CMake-based builds.

Rationale

Current state is that application builds from a Cargo workspace, has a single C++/Qt library dependency, and packaging & distribution is not implemented. Doing all that from Cargo is possible but painful.

Cargo

While Cargo is great at declarative dependency management, it focuses exclusively on Rust, but has no first-class support for other ecosystems. In order to wrap anything else other that Rust project within Cargo, I had to create bare Rust project with a procedural build-script (for example, CMake-based QuickFlux).

CMake

CMake, on the other hand, is less declarative but much more flexible. It supports C/C++ projects natively, and other ecosystems may be integrated as so called "external projects" — with dependencies between projects on build artifacts, include directories etc.

Summary

Entry points of both build system AND the program will be moved to CMake / C++. Rust parts will continue to exist for now, but as statically linked libraries with Qt plugins.