Do others share my experiences: Qt has become cumbersome to build/install

Axel Spoerl

@BwvB
Sad to read that Qt frustrates you increasingly.
I don't share such experiences, however. Probably not very surprising.
Can you break your encounters down into something more concrete?
Versions, operating systems, error messages, bug reports?

BwvB

@Axel-Spoerl

Hi Axel, thanks for responding.

Yesterday, I filed a bugreport (https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-120141).
An unrelated, but similar issue only occurring when static linking I filed some time earlier.

There was a compile error in the file
./qt3d/src/3rdparty/assimp/src/code/AssetLib/FBX/FBXBinaryTokenizer.cpp
I had to add #include <cstdint> to make it compile again.
Not reported.

As for the warnings: I just ran ./configure (release mode), doing nothing special. I get many warning in 3rd party code. I just wonder if you don't see those. I appreciate this is mostly 3rd party code, but the warnings are so many, and not obviously harmless. It would improve Qt's image to iron them out instead of having such a noisy installation.

Complaints about qpa plugins (?) not present: these appear sometimes when I install a new version. I have no clue what they mean. . You only notice this after installation. It ussally means blindly installing everything that contains e.g. 'xcb' or something like that, and hope for the best. with no guarantee it is going to work after hours of compilation.

qtwebengine: I cannot answer that right away. Currrently I have no qt-machine available. Maybe later.

I have recent versions of both clang++ (18.0.0) and g++ (13.2.1) on my openSuse leap 15.5 machines (2 machines, both show similar issues with QT).

My list could have been longer, but I have not consistently archived or reported all issues. Sorry.
But together it underpins my experience that building Qt has become cumbersome, often taking at least half a day or longer just to have everything built, installed and working with my applications.
If interest is there, I could investigate more if that helps ironing out these issues.

Kind Regards,
Bertwim

Axel Spoerl

@BwvB
Hi Bertwin,
Thanks for the bug report. Looks really strange and I began to ask myself if it shouldn’t actually test for the warning to occur. I’ll follow up on it.
I also use openSuSE, but Tumbleweed, as my daily working environment. I even build sometimes with all-warnings-are-errors and I build almost daily. I wonder why I don’t fall over that uninitialised pointer.
I can just encourage you to file bugs or turn to the mailing lists with specific problems.
Cheers
Axel

Christian Ehrlicher

The problem with the assimp library was fixed upstream already, need to sync it locally. Such include problems happen from time to time when the compiler devs decide to do some include cleanup. Then newer compiler will complain about missing includes as we can see here. Nothing we (or someone else) can do against this except reporting a bug or even better providing a patch for it. It will be fixed in 6.6.2 and 6.7.0.
https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-114239

Axel Spoerl

Update:

Yesterday, I filed a bugreport (https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-120141).
The fix for this will merge tonight.

@Christian-Ehrlicher said in Do others share my experiences: Qt has become cumbersome to build/install:

https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-114239

Thanks Christian for pointing this out.
A colleague of mine is dealing with it. Should also be fixed shortly.

kkoehne

Hi,

also not my experience, but fair. Just want to point out one thing:

@BwvB said in Do others share my experiences: Qt has become cumbersome to build/install:

when building makefiles with cmake

If that means that you're using the Makefile generator of cmake, this is only 'community supported' currently, and as such might be a source of all kinds of issues. The only officially supported build is with -GNinja / ninja.

BwvB

@kkoehne Ah, sorry. My mistake. I do use the ninja version.

One of the good things about Qt, is that the dev-team is taking issues seriously. I really appreciate this. It shows a professional attitude. The responses from Qt in this thread just show that.

Regards,
Bertwim

Anonymous_Banned275

@BwvB I would like to point out
in OP it is nicely stated that the intent of the post is

NOT seeking help
and
it is NOT a rant

so
why it is NOT moved to
lounge ?

( oh yes, it is not mine post so it is not moved ...)

My lounge comment would be
it is your business to build QT "from scratch"...

if QT developers have to be notified specific way , in specific forum , with specific bug, about USERS issues...

it is their business ,however, ,"they care , about THEIR products ( livelihood ) " is gross overstatement ( my opinion ) .

BwvB

@Axel-Spoerl On your question why you don't experience the issue with the uninitialised pointer, while you are building qt daily: I think this is because this problem does not show-up while building Qt, but when you do a 'cmake' of a project where a static qt linkage is required. In the find_package command, apparently only then the xxxxx.cmake file is used. You get a long, but otherwise reasonably clear message what is wrong.

Axel Spoerl

@BwvB
That's spot on. I ran a static build out of shere interest last night, to find out what you suspect I would find out :-)
Anyway, it's fixed. Thanks for reporting.
And sorry about @AnneRanch's strange post. I hope it hasn't insulted you.

BwvB

@Axel-Spoerl Great it has been fixed. I am not offended by the other post. I really appreciate the constructive response of qt people!

Christian Ehrlicher

@BwvB The problem is the huge amount of possibilities of different compilers, os and others - Qt CI can only test shared builds on 16 different platforms with 48 configurations. see e.g. https://testresults.qt.io/coin/integration/qt/qtbase/tasks/1705338888