Because of gdb problems with Qt Creator 1.2 I decided to build Qt with
MSVC 2008 so I could use CDB and enjoy the benefits of smaller Qt DLLs
and EXEs. Here are my observations on the process. Note that I
already have a 'normal' installation of Qt/Qt Creator in c:\qt\2009.03
so I don't need to rebuild any of the Qt tools or examples.
1. I downloaded the full SDK and installed it into c:\qt\4.5.2-vc. I
fired up the VS2008 Command Prompt and entered 'configure -platform
win32-msvc2008' followed by 'nmake'. First problem - 8 or 9 linker
errors when building the QtWebKitD.dll. The solution is the remove
the following files:
src/3rdparty/webkit/WebCore/tmp/moc/{debug,release}_shared/mocinclude.tmp
The above files need to be removed from the next Qt installation.
2. There really needs to be a way to ignore examples/demos via
configure, as building all of these takes a long time. I wanted to
end up with a bare bones Qt folder containing just the essentials and
didn't count on all the examples being built. It took nearly 3 hours
on my machine!
3. Once the build has completed you can kiss goodbye to 4.5GB of disk
space. Yikes. Digging around I found dozens of 'tmp' folders
containing nearly 3GB of .obj files that aren't needed. The make
process should remove these.
4. Some guidance on what are essential Qt files and what can be
removed to allow Qt Creator to use the MS compiler/linker would be
useful. I'm pretty sure that I can remove everything except for the
'Qt' folder itself. I also want to experiment with building static VS
libraries so will have to endure much of this process again.
5. Why don't Nokia supply a bare-bones Qt installation for Windows
that is built with VS?
6. The Qt DLLs are *much* smaller then their MinGW counterparts -
some are 50% smaller. Apparently the MS linker is much better at
throwing away unused code.
7. Setting up Qt Creator to use the new DLLs was a breeze but I did
need to rebuild the debugging helpers.
8. The CDB debuuging helpers aren't as good as the gdb ones - no QMap
support for example. Be warned!
Getting this to work wasn't too difficult but an official step-by-step
guide from Nokia would be welcome. It could cover things like full
vs. minimal builds, etc. For a novice this would be quite the
exercise.
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