Attemping to use Qt 4.6 breaks make command

[ajoffe]

Thanks toreo for shedding some light on this.

2009.01 was the last version with make.bat.

I see, so do we now have to type "mingw32-make" every time to compile? Any ideas why the bat file was removed?

Learning later about the background of mingw32-make and its lack of features, I have since dropped making this customization.

Where can I read about these issues? Is it ever advisable to use anything other than mingw32-make?

Thanks.

[toreo]

I see, so do we now have to type "mingw32-make" every time to compile? Any ideas why the bat file was removed?


Where can I read about these issues? Is it ever advisable to use anything other than mingw32-make?

I don't know why the bat file was removed (haven't seen any official comment by Nokia on it), but I can guess that it was to avoid confusion with the POSIX make that comes with MSYS. The POSIX make tool will expect POSIX style paths and requires either MSYS (i.e /c/src/myproj) or Cygwin (i.e /cygdrive/c/src/myproj) as opposed to Windows drive letters and backslashes. Attempting to combine the two path styles normally result in massive headaches and broken builds.

mingw32-make has fewer dependencies than a POSIX make and can be run from cmd.exe. So it's a quicker, simpler solution that supports Windows paths and is supported by default from Nokia's distribution. To have qmake generate makefiles with POSIX paths you have to rebuild qmake as well. You will find more information about this by googling for "qt msys" for instance. Depending on your choice of IDE it may or may not be possible to get it to build using MSYS. That would give you a more powerful shell to work in, and your make tool would support parallel builds, but it will take some work to get there. YMMV.

There's a brief and vague mention on the difference between mingw32-make and make in the MinGW FAQ, other than that I guess the source code and googling are your best options for learning more.

-Tore

[ajoffe]

Thanks for explaining, that makes sense. I don't use MSYS but I can see why the old make.bat would be problematic in that context.