QT’s qmake

Geeezus. There’s a lot wrong with “make” in general and there’s been way too many attempts to fix it; no-one, as far as I can see, has got it right yet. qmake is no exception, but it does in fact manage to be particularly bad.

Firstly, the makefiles that qmake generates can’t do a “make DESTDIR=<whatever> install”, no, that’s too standardised, we couldn’t have that. You have to do a stupid “make INSTALL_ROOT=<whatever> install” instead (DESTDIR has some completely different and somewhat retarded meaning). And that, of course, doesn’t actually work, because the file paths in the makefile are written in such a way that it just doesn’t work. You can fix it by editing the “qmake.conf” file in the QT bundle and add “no_fixpath” at the end of the options listed for the CONFIG variable, before you run qmake. Why isn’t that the default? Considering that “fixing” the path actually borks it, I’m not sure what sort of numbnut came up with the term or the code.

It’s easy to verify this by trying to compile “qca” (QT cryptographic architecture) and installing it in some alternate location. If no_fixpath isn’t set, it doesn’t work, does it? Hello QT developers?

Oh yeah, and qmake has a very limited concept of quoting, but that’s certainly a problem not limited to this particular software package.

Sigh.

Edit: Apparently “no_fixpath” is no longer required in Qt 4.3.1; I’m not sure when it was fixed (it was a problem in 3.3.7). However INSTALL_ROOT is still used instead of (the de facto standard) DESTDIR.

OpenOffice

Well as a product OO is not actually too bad, it’s just a nightmare to build the friggin’ thing. I mean would it be too hard to put together some coherent build documentation? The best that I have found so far is the page entitled “building open office under linux“. That page tells me I need the csh shell, but do I really? What is the –with-use-shell=bash option for then? It also tells me that I need to download and extract the “gpc” library in some directory, which also appears to be a lie as the build completed just fine without that. I pass the –disable-mozilla option to configure because I don’t want to have to deal with mozilla and it might reduce the size/duration of the build. I’m not sure what functionality I’ll miss out on; the documentation neglects to tell me that.

Upon running the “configure” script I am told that I need to either fetch a pre-built dll file and plonk it in some directory. Either that, or install mingw as a cross-compiler so that the dll can be built. WTF? This is linux I’m building on, why is a Windows dll needed? I can’t be stuffed installing mingw so I just grab the pre-built dll.