Authors: Justin Karneges justin@affinix.com, Sergey Ilinykh rion4ik@gmail.com, Ivan Romanov drizt@land.ru
Mailing List: Delta Project delta@lists.affinix.com
Website: http://delta.affinix.com/qconf/

QConf allows you to have a nice configure script for your qmake-based project. It is intended for developers who don't need (or want) to use the more complex GNU autotools. QConf also generates a configure.exe program for use on Windows.

./configure
make
make install

First, create a project.qc file. It is in an XML format:

<qconf>
  <name>MyProject</name>         <!-- a friendly string  -->
  <profile>project.pro</profile> <!-- your qmake profile -->
</qconf>

Then, run qconf on your file:

qconf project.qc

Assuming all goes well, this will output configure and configure.exe programs. Simply copy these files into your application package. Make sure to include(conf.pri) in your project.pro file.

Tip: If qconf is launched with no arguments, it will use the first .qc file it can find in the current directory. If there is no .qc file, then it will look for a .pro file, and create a .qc for you based on it.

Once the configure programs have been created, they are immediately usable. The programs perform the following tasks:

1. Check for a proper Qt build environment. This is done by compiling the conf program, which ensures that the Qt library, qmake, and necessary compiler tools are present and functioning.

2. conf is launched, which does any needed dependency checking and creates a suitable conf.pri. This operation also ensures that not only can Qt-based programs be successfully built, but launched as well.

3. qmake is invoked on the project's .pro file.

Assuming configuration was a success, a Makefile should be generated and the user can now run the make tool (e.g. make).

The script does not touch any of your project files. The only output is a conf.pri file. It is up to you to actually include conf.pri in your .pro file.

Tip: Passing the --verbose option to configure can aid in diagnosing configuration problems.

Q: How do I specify dependencies?
A: List them in your .qc file using the <dep> element. Follow sampledeps.qc for a hint.

Q: My dependency is not supported!
A: You will need to make it. Look in the modules folder to see how it is done. If you find that you need to make a lot of these, perhaps you should consider GNU autotools or CMake.

Q: How does qconf find modules?
A: Modules are found in the modules subdirectory within the configured libdir (default is /usr/local/share/qconf). Additional directories can be specified using the <moddir> element. For instance:

<moddir>qcm</moddir>

The above element would cause qconf to look for modules in the relative directory qcm. This is useful if you want to bundle modules within your application distribution.

Q: How do I perform custom processing or add project-specific arguments?
A: The recommended way of doing this is to create an extra.qcm file that does the processing you need, and then just add it to your .qc file like any normal dependency. Implement checkString() in your module to return an empty QString if you want to suppress output.

Q: How can I install more than just the binary with 'make install'?
A: You need to specify the extra files using the qmake INSTALLS variable (see qmake docs for details).

Q: What environment variables are available?
A: Main variables: PREFIX, BINDIR, LIBDIR, QTDIR. All other variables are written as QC_FOO, where FOO is the option name in all caps. Boolean variables are set to Y when flagged.