[Interest] Building 32-bit Qt 5 on Mac

Stephen Chu stephen at ju-ju.com
Mon Apr 23 23:16:22 CEST 2012


On 4/23/12 5:11 PM, Michael Jackson wrote:
>
> On Apr 23, 2012, at 4:57 PM, Stephen Chu wrote:
>
>> On 4/23/12 4:49 PM, Michael Jackson wrote:
>>> I am going to do this from memory but www.apple.com is going to be the source for the exact answer.
>>>
>>> OS X 10.5 was both PPC and Intel and 32 and 64 bit (Kinda/ sort of).
>>>
>>> You could install OS X 10.5 on 32/64 bit PPC and some Intel machines. Apple did early on use the Intel Core Duo and Core Solo which are 32 bit processors. So there are some intel machines that can run OS X 10.5 (even 10.4.11) but only in 32 bit mode.
>>>
>>> OS X 10.6&   10.7 Requirements:
>>> http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4949
>>>
>>> OS X 10.5 Requirements:
>>> http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3759
>>>
>>> The question you need to ask yourself is how many of your customers are still using OS X 10.5? If you have a relatively "new" app I would ditch 32 bit support and just go with 64 bit support from here on out. If you have some sort of custom app for an internal IT department or something special where you need to support back to OS X 10.5 I would just stick with Qt 4.7.4 which should have support for building all the way back to 10.5 with Cocoa or Carbon.
>>>
>>
>> We definitely have to support 10.6 and that means some of the customer may have 32-bit machines. And in my industry, it's really common to have older Macs running our software. They don't update very frequently, if at all.
>>
>> We just finally got rid of PPC support this year. :(
>
> I would stick with Qt 4.7.4 for exactly that purpose. Is there something super-special that you MUST have in Qt 4.8 for your application? If you have machines that old then you are going to be "stuck" with Qt 4.7.x until those machines can get upgraded. From the writing on the wall it looks like 32 bit support is being or should be dumped by Qt for OS X. Apple certainly dumped it when OS X 10.7 came out.
>
> If Qt 5 is supposed to run on ALL OS X 10.6 machines then there is a bug in that Qt 5 will NOT build in 32 bit mode.
>
> MJ.

Actually Qt 4.8 is not a problem. I have it built in 32-bit already. 
It's Qt 5 I am having trouble with.

It's mentioned somewhere on Qt 5 supported platforms that 10.6 will be 
2nd tier platform. I suppose it means 32-bit should be supported, hence 
the bug report.

There's some nice additions like V8 JS engine and JSON support in Qt 5 
that I am interested in. Not terribly hard to replace in 4.8. But I'd 
like to keep up since this project eventually have to be updated.



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