[Qt-creator] Defining project dependencies?

[Oliver.Knoll at comit.ch]

Eike Ziller wrote on Monday, November 03, 2008 3:21 PM:

> On Nov 3, 2008, at 2:49 PM, ext Oliver.Knoll at comit.ch wrote:
>
>> Hi there,
>>
>> with great interest I tried the Qt Creator Technical Preview!
>>
>> One of the first things I have tried was to setup a Project with
>> several sub-projects, typically the main application ("Qt 4 Gui
>> Application") which depends on several "C++ Libraries".
>> ...
>> Once the Shared Library has been added besides the other Project I
>> also don't see any way how I would specify the dependency afterwards.
>> ...
> This seems to got lost from the UI...

Does that imply that it is indeed the goal to have a GUI way of specifying Project dependencies and Qt Creator modifies the *.pro files in such a way that at least the linker settings are correct (and all Projects link properly)?

Concrete: when I have a main Project (executable) and a library Project and in Qt Creator GUI I set the dependency from the main to the library Project: the library gets compiled first and the main Project is linked against that library - and off course, handling all other inter-library dependencies that I wish to set accordingly, disallowing me to create "dependency circles", e.g. by greying out the Projects which already depend on the current Project etc. (as in Visual Studio).

Is this what you mean by "This seem to got lost from the UI"?

>> ... As a side-note: what is the "philosophy" of Qt
>> Creator? Am I supposed to edit the *.pro files? ...
> You are supposed to work with pro files directly. We are working on
> providing a more convenient editor for pro files, but it will still
> be mostly text-based.

Oh okay... I thought the idea was to have ways to specify everything(tm) in the Qt Creator GUI. So I understand the Project wizard merely setup a simple *.pro file and from this point on I am on my own (in terms of setting additional 3rd-party library dependencies, INCLUDE/LIB paths, conditional compiles (the "win32 {SOURCES +=...}", read: all the nuts and bolts settings QMake has to offer), is that correct?

But at least the following features would be nice to be able to do in the GUI:

- Possibility to enable/disable Qt modules (QtCore, QtGui, ...)
- Set DEFINES, INCLUDE and LIBS

I know, this is done just as easy by editing the *.pro file.

And maybe it would be nice to be able to "clone" a given Project, so all the relevant settings (except the SOURCES, FORMS and HEADERS off course) would be copied. Would make life much easier when creating a new Project, given an existing one, so I would not have to edit the DEFINES etc. again and again (this idea needs some more thoughtful thinking though ;)

> What you can do at the moment is
> * Setting a "build directory" using the "shadow build" checkbox

Okay, so /that/ is what the "shadow build" is supposed to do ;)


Thanks, Oliver