Re: qt: monolithic or modular?

[Efraim Flashner]

On Tue, Apr 05, 2016 at 11:38:18AM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Efraim Flashner <address@hidden> skribis:
> 
> > I try very hard to not build qt
> > on my laptop, mostly because of the long build time (7 hours on hydra
> > [0]). Currently we download and use the big download of qt[1] and
> > frankly I'd rather not. Qt does also ship in smaller bits[2], 32 if I
> > counted correctly. I propose we package the submodules and over time
> > we go through the packages that use qt and switch out the monolithic
> > qt for just the parts that the program actually uses. It makes it less
> > daunting to build, should make the closures smaller, and means that if
> > a submodule fails to build on an architecture then they only lose that
> > module, not all of qt.
> 
> I’m all for it!  It may also simplify unbundling as discussed in
> <http://bugs.gnu.org/21288>.  (We’ll need a Qt updaters and/or importer
> at some point.)
> 
> The difficulty is to make sure Qt finds its modules at run time, but the
> fact that Nixpkgs uses this approach¹ suggests that it should work.
> 
> If you’re willing to work on this, I would suggest creating a branch,
> which we’ll build on Hydra when is appropriate.
> 
> Thanks,
> Ludo’.
> 
> ¹ 
> https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/development/libraries/qt-5/5.4/default.nix

quick followup: qtbase has the full config and makefiles, a bunch of the
other modules don't. It was suggested to me on irc that after compiling
qtbase I should try running qmake in the other folders to compile them,
but I haven't had a chance to progress that far yet.

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