[Nix-dev] Qt Creator issues

[Bjørn Forsman]

Hi BENOIST,

Thanks for replying.

On 28 May 2013 22:56, Baptist BENOIST <return_0 at live.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I wrote the QtCreator derivation a few months ago but did not used it
> recently...

Ok.

>> Today I tried using Qt Creator in NixOS. I found two issues:
>>
>> The first issue is that there is no way to create applications from
>> File -> New File or Project. On Ubuntu I have an "Applications" entry
>> just above the "Libraries" entry. On NixOS the "Applications" entry is
>> missing. I suspect this is related to this error that is spewed all
>> over the terminal (100 times or so) after clicking on File -> New File
>> or Project:
>>
>> Cannot update Qt version information:
>> /nix/store/0g7rv5wclspqz80pb2dkjxqxf2651xar-qt-4.8.3/bin/qmake cannot
>> be run.
>
> This message is not prompted on a clean and up to date configuration (see
> the attached screenshot).
> If this can help, mine is based on the version 4.8.4 of Qt4
> qt4_for_qtcreator...

Weird. I have qt-4.8.4 too. I rebuilt my system maybe a week ago or
so. I have qtcreator in environment.systemPackages, so it's definitely
not an old qtcreator installed with nix-env.

> Anyways, I do not have the applications entry too.
> I only used this application to open CMake projects and did not saw that the
> Applications entry was missing because I only opened existing projects.

Ok.

>> The path it refers to doesn't exist. (And building qtcreator again
>> from source still refers to the same broken nix store path! I need to
>> confirm this.)
>
>> The second issue is that there are no examples in the examples tab; it
>> is empty. I think this should fix itself if qt is built with examples
>> & demos. (Because skimming over the source it seems that Qt knows
>> where the demos & examples are installed, so qtcreator can ask the
>> library.)
>
> Facts that examples are not defaultly present is not really an issue.
> As examples are optional for disk usage reasons (which I totally agree as an
> heavy VM user) on other distros such as ArchLinux and debian (maybe not
> ubuntu), and because I did not need it, I did not tried to add examples.

Well, maybe not a bug-like issue, but when installing Qt Creator I
think having the examples (which are integrated into the IDE)
available makes a lot of sense.

FYI, with a plain qt install:

./configure -prefix /tmp/qt-lib/ -v -no-separate-debug-info -release
-no-fast -confirm-license -opensource
make
make install

$ du -sc /tmp/qt-lib/* | sort -nr
498032  totalt
318264  /tmp/qt-lib/doc
71148   /tmp/qt-lib/lib
39828   /tmp/qt-lib/examples
19424   /tmp/qt-lib/include
18388   /tmp/qt-lib/bin
12784   /tmp/qt-lib/demos
7296    /tmp/qt-lib/translations
4168    /tmp/qt-lib/plugins
3076    /tmp/qt-lib/mkspecs
2584    /tmp/qt-lib/tests
424     /tmp/qt-lib/imports
328     /tmp/qt-lib/q3porting.xml
320     /tmp/qt-lib/phrasebooks

Regarding size, doc is the worst offender here (and it is disabled in
nixpkgs), with 300 MB! lib is 71 MB, examples 40 MB and demos 13 MB.

>> I tried to build qt4_for_qtcreator without "-nomake examples
>> -nomake demos", but that didn't do it. It didn't even make qt install
>> the examples & demos in $out. Well, that's confusing.
>
> Did you tried with "-make examples -make demos"?
> According to the derivation (I did not wrote the Qt one, only occasional
> maintaining), examples should be installed in
> $out/share/doc/${name}/examples.

No I didn't try that. But I tried building qt outside of nix and then
it installs examples & demos with this configure line:

./configure -prefix /tmp/qt-lib/ -v -no-separate-debug-info -release
-no-fast -confirm-license -opensource
make
make install

IOW, removing "-nomake ..." should make it work. I don't know what
happened when I built it with nix.

> I only wrote this derivation because it was non-existing and I needed it for
> my own usage, if you want to contribute by improving it, you are welcome =)

Yes, I'd like to improve it. But the build-time for Qt is really high
in my VM. I think it took 2-3 hours to build. Next time I'll
definitely prefix the command with "time" so I'll know for sure.

> When I will have enough time (I unfortunately cannot give you a precise
> date), I will update it to the version 2.7.1. Maybe that the Applications
> entry will be working as intended. You can even create an issue on github if
> you want to work/discuss on it with commits ;-)

Ok.

Best regards,
Bjørn Forsman