[Development] CMake, PRLs, static Qt and private Qt deps

Mikkel Krautz mikkel at krautz.dk
Sat May 14 10:19:38 CEST 2016


Before Qt 5.0 was released, the CMake helper files included a useful
feature that read .prl files in order to find and include Qt
dependencies (such as, say, libqtpcre, but also dynamic system
libraries, and whatever else) in CMake builds against a statically
linked Qt.

This was removed by the following change:

https://codereview.qt-project.org/#/c/37307/
https://github.com/qtproject/qtbase/commit/102e1822ffcdc9954d3c698f863734a8083e349c

This means that building against a static Qt simply isn't practical
using Qt's CMake support, in that you'd have to manually specify the
internal dependencies, or include a CMake-based prl reader in your own
source tree.

Are there any new developments regarding this?

The code review mentions that CMake might grow to support this use
case better in the future -- does anyone know whether anything has
improved on that front?

I realize that Qt 5.0 was a while ago, and there seemingly hasn't been
any great demand for this. But it is a feature I would like to have.

I'm not volunteering just yet, but would this feature be accepted back
in, if implemented properly?

Thanks,
Mikkel

P.S.
If anyone's interested, there is a bit of unused code in
qtbase/mkspecs//features/create_cmake.prf relating PRL files and CMake
that could probably removed for now. It was only added to support this
feature.



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