Qt-4.4.3/4.5

[Robert Daniels]

Version upgrade to 4.4.0, with new features, performance enhancements.

I've been using it since its release, have not ran into any issues with backwards compatibility. It will be required by KDE-4.1 when it is released.

Build instructions are the same, but may wish to mention -no-phonon and -no-webkit options, as they are external projects that may be installed separately if desired.

[thomas]

Currently, the version is 4.4.3

[willimm]

If there is a Qt 4.4.3, why not KDE 4.1?

[ken@…]

I had issues with 4.4.1 (it didn't seem to like -nomake demos), and carelessly allowed it to create directories all over /usr. The following appears to be doing the right thing for an install in /usr without requiring an update to ld.so.conf (and not supporting qt3)

./configure -prefix /usr \
-docdir /usr/share/qt-4.4.3/doc \
-plugindir /usr/lib/qt4plugins \
-datadir /usr/share/qt-4.4.3 \
-translationdir /usr/share/qt-4.4.3/translations \
-sysconfdir /etc/qt4 \
-no-qt3support \
-nomake examples -nomake demos \
-openssl-linked \
-system-sqlite \
-reduce-relocations

This will put the libs into /usr/lib and the headers into directories in /usr/include (phonon, Qt*).

Not used in anger, but using make INSTALL_ROOT=/some/place install.

[bdubbs@…]

Just as another data point, I installed qt-x11-commercial-src-4.5.0-tp1.tar.gz into /opt/qt-4.5.0 and it works flawlessly in parallel with qt-3. I'm still running KDE-3.5 so I need it. The qt4 and qt3 libraries don't conflict, and you can specify where to get the headers when installing, but you can't install them in the same place as qt3's includes--they do conflict. The only other thing needed is to either specify a full path when running a program or use different PATH statements for different shell instances.

I basically used the instructions for qt3, method 2. One thing that's changed is that you don't need to specify system-zlib, etc or -plugin-imgfmt-png, etc any more as configure looks for them and uses them if found.

./configure -prefix /opt/qt-4.5.0 -sysconfdir /etc/qt \
            -plugin-sql-mysql -I/usr/include/mysql
make
sudo make install 

worked great for me. I did make the examples and demos because I needed them for work. I'm doing some reasonably hard core Qt development and so far everything is working fine.

[ken@…]

Looks like -no-qt3support wasn't a good idea, kdelibs-4.1.3 now fails to configure with

CMake Error: The following variables are used in this project, but they are set to NOTFOUND.
Please set them or make sure they are set and tested correctly in the CMake files:
QT_QT3SUPPORT_LIBRARY (ADVANCED)

[ken@…]

At last I'm making a little progress in taming this! First,

 -no-phonon

should be obligatory if you plan to build kde4! The included version of phonon is old. Phonon-4.2.0 will happily overwrite it (unless you have package management tools that prevent this), but if like me you rebuild QT after building phonon, then kdebase-runtime falls apart. Doesn't make a lot of difference to the time or space requirement, but it is doing the right thing.

In my opinion, most people will probably want to use the supplied version of webkit.

Second is to get rid of the debug files. Configure claims that 'release' is the default, and testing shows that is the case. BUT, the install is littered with .debug versions of programs and libraries, and on my box (building docs, demos, examples) the time is 88,5 minutes and the space is 3446M (826M for the install, 2620M for the build).

Fedora uses

-no-separate-debug-info

With that, and still with docs, demos, examples, the time fell to 71,5 minutes and the space to 1044M (235M installed, 809M build). I think that's a result ;) I'm now looking at the docs, examples, and demos.

[ken@…]

For icing on the cake,

-nomake "demos docs examples"

(found at gobolinux) is a variant on specifying what not to build. Time to build and install now falls to 52.5 minutes, total space 803M (of which only 70M is the installed files.

There are still odd bits and pieces lingering around (phrasebooks, stuff for other OS's in mkspecs/, q3porting.xml) but they are < 2.5MB total. The biggest next item (2.4MB) is the translations, and I assume those are just locale files - I don't remove those for anything else, so I won't attempt to remove them here. For me, the gains from trying to slim down mkspecs are not worth the effort.

[bdubbs@…]

I'm going to take this but hold off a bit to see if version 4.5 is released soon.

My day job is primarily developing code with Qt and have been using the commercial version of the beta versions of 4.5. I'm hoping for a normal release in January.

[willimm]

Anyway, Nokia (they own Qt now) is making a very nice IDE for Qt, called Qt Creator. When that gets released, I want it in the book.

[willimm]

Replying to willimm:

Anyway, Nokia (they own Qt now) is making a very nice IDE for Qt, called Qt Creator. When that gets released, I want it in the book.

It will get released around the same time as Qt 4.5/KDE 4.2.

Oh, and BTW, Nokia is behind a lot of cell phones, so mabe they're going to use QT for one?

Just my thought because Qt is now owned by Nokia, as mentoned above.

[willimm]

Qt creator's website: ​http://trolltech.com/developer/qt-creator/qt-creator.

[bdubbs@…]

Fixed at revision 7711.

There are a couple of notes here:

• The file is huge - 108 MB. Expanded it is 737M after the build. Without demos and examples.

• The time is loong. 40 SBU for full (2.8 hours on a 2GHz system) and 29 SBU for the essential packages.

• The installed size is about 207 MB without demos and examples, but the extra is only a relatively modest (for this package) 50 MB.

13M     bin
138M    doc  <-- We could save 104M if we dropped the html and 
                 src (images) directories.  All the docs are 
                 available locally via the 'assistant' 
                 application and these directories are
                 redundant.
14M     include
37M     lib
1.7M    mkspecs
284K    phrasebooks
1.8M    plugins
332K    q3porting.xml
2.4M    translations

• From my experience with an early version of Qt-4.5, the debug libraries add about 1 GB!

• I have not worked with cmake/KDE4 yet so I left out Ken's recommendation to use the -no-phonon option. When we put KDE4 in the book, this may need to be revisited.

[(none)]

Milestone 6.4 deleted