I want to have both Debug and Release versions of the Qt libraries on my Linux system such that I can build both versions of my application side by side. I want to do what I can do on Windows simply by specifing either the Debug or Release build from within Qt Creator.

Nicely enough on Windows you get a .debug and .release version of your make file. I know how to use the debug/release settings in the project.pro file so I can control the compiled output of my apps code, but I'm stuck on getting the correct Qt library.

I need to be able to debug down into the Qt libraries from time to time. At this point the only way I can do this is to build two versions of the Qt environment and install them into the what appears to be the 'same' directory. I then rename the directories according to which version of the Qt libraries I want to use.

QT_INSTALL_LIBS in qmake seems to be the limiting factor. Can both the debug and release versions of the Qt libraries be in the same directory like windows? I'm not a Linux expert so I am not fully aware of what I can do with Linux libraries, etc.