[Development] Source build woes on windows

[Kuba Ober]

On Sep 16, 2013, at 4:59 PM, Thiago Macieira <thiago.macieira at intel.com> wrote:
> On segunda-feira, 16 de setembro de 2013 14:17:41, Kuba Ober wrote:
>> I'm trying to build 5.1.1 from source (.zip download) on Windows using
>> MSVC2012, in a separate prefix (shadow) build. So far I've run into two
>> issues:
>> 
>> 1. configure.bat fails to bootstrap without .gitignore being present.
>> Wouldn't it be better to check for presence of configure.exe? Are we only
>> supposed to build from a git clone? If so, is there any purpose for the
>> .zip/.tar.gz downloads? The workaround is to manually add .gitignore. Or
>> else I'm just very confused :(
> 
> You're supposed to build only from a) a git clone or b) the official tarballs or 
> .zip. Downloading a .zip file from Gitorious is not supported.

This is from the official source download from qt-project.org
(qt-everywhere-opensource-src-5.1.1.tar.gz). It plainly doesn't build for me.
There's no configure.exe, and the batch file won't attempt to make a configure.exe
if there's no .gitignore.

Note that there *is* .gitignore in both qtquickcontrols and qtserialport!

Perhaps my problem is with using the smaller .tar.gz instead of a .zip? I don't want
to re-download at the moment, I'm on a very slow link.

>> 2. Having configured with -qt-zlib, prefix/qtbase/include/QtZlib is missing.
>> In other words, the zlib headers are not copied over from the source to the
>> build prefix. This makes the qtsvg build fail.
[…]
> My suggestion is, of course, that qtsvg gets its own copy of zlib in 
> src/3rdparty. Anyone who can't or won't have a system-installed & shared zlib 
> will pay the penalty of having zlib duplicated in memory up to 6 times.

This is seriously broken, then. What's so special about zlib that we need to have
a system-wide installation? Can't Qt include just one copy that is only linked-in once?
Yes, it'd mean that Qt needs to, in essence, build its own shared zlib if you select
-qt-zlib, but that's how it should have been all along, right? I don't quite get why is zlib
linked statically when you have a shared build of qt. No other 3rd party code used in more than
one module seems to behave this way…

Cheers, Kuba