I have seen the suggestion of a command line option, and the option of a
file next to the tool, but I haven't seen a suggestion of what Qt does
for the last 11 years for plugin loading, which has many of the same
challenges with cross-compiling etc. That is - embed the metadata into
the binary itself and read the data from a readonly section of the binary:

$ objcopy /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/plugins/imageformats/libqtiff.so
/dev/null --dump-section .qtmetadata=/dev/stdout
QTMETADATA
!�x1org.qt-project.Qt.QImageIOHandlerFactoryInterfacekQTiffPlugin�dKeys�dtiffctifiMimeTypes�jimage/tiffjimage/tiff


I think in Qt 6 it works the same way, but the plugins have cbor data
encoded in them. This allows Qt to know whether a plugin can load .jpg
or .png etc.

https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2012-February/001827.html

You could try to pursue something similar, but it would assume/require a
way to read data sections from a binary.

Thanks,

Stephen


On 15/06/2023 13:06, René Ferdinand Rivera Morell via SG15 wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 2, 2023 at 4:32 PM Tom Honermann<tom_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>> On 6/2/23 5:08 PM, Olga Arkhipova wrote:
>>> I believe that IDEs and different generators will very likely be interested in build tool capabilities. And those IDE/generators processes might not even be able to launch a tool as they are not necessarily running in the environment the tool can run. Or they might be running on a different OS altogether for some cross-platform development.
>> This is a very good point.
> Can someone point out some concrete examples of that situation that I
> can investigate? As I'm not familiar with that use case.
>