The Fugue

I finally got around to building QCad on OS X Leopard. There are two main hurdles: getting Qt3 to build and getting QCad to build.

At first I tried building Qt3 with macports, but building QCad was a royal pain with the X11 version of Qt3 on OS X, for whatever reason. So I tried to install the qt3-mac MacPorts package, but that failed. So I was on my own building Qt3.

This patch will allow Qt3 to build on Leopard, by following the instructions in the INSTALL file. Here’s the diffstat:

 config.tests/mac/mac_version.test |    2 +-
 src/kernel/qcursor_mac.cpp        |    4 ++++
 src/kernel/qt_mac.h               |    2 +-
 src/tools/qglobal.h               |    5 ++++-
 4 files changed, 10 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

I put it in /Developer/qt3, and I wrote a script to source on demand rather
than setting QTDIR and friends in my .profile or .bashrc, since I more
often want Qt4 than Qt3. I configure with -static, so applications like QCad
are built with Qt3 statically, which just makes things work better.

QCad needs a patch as well:

Index: qcad-2.0.5.0-1-community.src/mkspecs/defs.pro
===================================================================
--- qcad-2.0.5.0-1-community.src.orig/mkspecs/defs.pro  2008-03-26 08:46:25.000000000 -0600
+++ qcad-2.0.5.0-1-community.src/mkspecs/defs.pro       2008-03-26 08:46:48.000000000 -0600
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 # $Id: defs.pro 606 2004-12-25 03:08:40Z andrew $
-QMAKE_CXXFLAGS_DEBUG += -pedantic
-QMAKE_CXXFLAGS += -pedantic
+#QMAKE_CXXFLAGS_DEBUG += -pedantic
+#QMAKE_CXXFLAGS += -pedantic

 win32 {
   QMAKE_CFLAGS_THREAD -= -mthreads
Index: qcad-2.0.5.0-1-community.src/scripts/build_qcad.sh
===================================================================
--- qcad-2.0.5.0-1-community.src.orig/scripts/build_qcad.sh     2008-03-26 08:46:06.000000000 -0600
+++ qcad-2.0.5.0-1-community.src/scripts/build_qcad.sh  2008-03-26 08:46:49.000000000 -0600
@@ -30,7 +30,7 @@ then
     export MAKE=gmake
     echo "Platform is Solaris"
     platform=solaris
-elif [ "x$OSTYPE" == "xdarwin8.0" ]
+elif [ "x$OSTYPE" == "xdarwin8.0" -o "x$OSTYPE" == "xdarwin9.0" ]
 then
     export MAKE=make
     echo "Platform is Mac OS X"

Then do

cd scripts
./build_qcad.sh notrans

It will complain about not finding qm/*.qm, but that’s a nonfatal error.
QCad.app will be in the qcad directory, ready for your use.

I built this on an Intel MacBook running Leopard. If you think that matches
your setup, you’re free to download my QCad.app and avoid
building both Qt3 and QCad.

I find myself asking this question a lot: “Now what was that define that detects annoying platform that makes porting otherwise perfectly-portable code difficult?”

This will narrow your search down to something useful:

echo | cpp -dM

Go ahead, try it. I wish I’d known this one earlier.