Thoughts on Qt

Richard W.M. Jones rjones at redhat.com
Sun Feb 1 23:57:56 UTC 2009


Inspired by a talk I listened to yesterday about Qt, I had a look at
packaging Qt.  It's non-trivial, but here are my thoughts ..

We need to start with the Qt-Win (open source version).  Version 4.4.3
which I looked at is GPL, but upcoming version 4.5 will be under LGPL
so allowing commercial development.  Nevertheless we can practice
packaging using 4.4.3.

Comes with a "configure.exe" program.  This needs to be run under
Wine, so we cannot use it for cross-compilation.  Even though we have
the source for configure.exe, that doesn't help because it has to be
compiled for the Win32 API so would still need to be run under Wine.
Instead, I run configure.exe by hand, and capture the files created &
modified in a patch.

Uses a custom build system, qmake, and of course qmake doesn't fully
understand cross-compilation.  Ugh!  We can run the native qmake (from
qt-devel package) with the -win32 option, which is promising but it
generates and tests files with \ in the names.  I'm still working on
this.

This page is a little bit useful: http://silmor.de/38

You can find the initial work on this in the Mercurial repo, but don't
expect anything usable at the moment.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
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