Question

I’ve set up a cross-compile environment with mingw on my ubuntu machine and I’m trying to set it up with Qt.

I’ve read a couple of blog posts and other reference pages on setting this up, but none of them seem to explain about where to get the Qt headers from. Of the few that do, they all seem to say download the installer for Qt creator for windows, run it in wine, browse to where the header files are and copy them out.

Are these files different from the ones I have already installed? (I Installed the Qt packages from apt-get) I don’t see the point in the half a gig download and unpacking time if I already have the files I need.

cheers in advance 🙂

Answer 1

Are the C++ Qt Headers the same for windows and linux?

They’re different. During compilation from source on windows platform qt generates at least one platform-specific file, which is not present in original source code distribution archive.

One of such files is qconfig.h (src/corelib/global/qconfig.h), which is indirectly included from QtGlobal and contains certain platform-specific definitions, such as:

#define Q_BYTE_ORDER Q_LITTLE_ENDIAN

// Compile time features
#define QT_ARCH_WINDOWS

On linux the file will have very different contents.

This file does not exist in source code distribution and is generated during compilation. On linux system this file will have different contents. So no, you can’t just use linux headers. YOu might be able to manually tweak headers, but it’ll be easier to simply grab existing package insted. And, obviously, you’ll need libraries (.dll/.lib (or *.a)) to link with Qt, and linux libraries won’t be suitable for that.

don’t see the point in the half a gig download

Instead of downloading sdk download libraries (see bottom of the page). Each package is 200..300 MB, which is less than “half a gig”.