More Qt on S60: building an app

I’ve been working on a Qt Symbian S60 app to familiarize myself with Symbian development. After struggling with the build system for about an hour, a passage from Dr. Kenneth Kamler’s book – Surviving the extremes – popped into my mind:

While crossing an aluminium ladder placed horizontally to bridge a crevasse in the ice, Passang had slipped and fallen 80 feet, wedging himself headfirst between the narrowing walls of ice at the bottom.

Working quickly, a combined team of Spanish and Nepalese climbers managed to get a rope around his waist and hoist him back up to the surface. But by then he had been refrigerated upside down for nearly half an hour.

Fascinating book, I cannot recommend it highly enough. To prevent anyone else from slipping on a makefile and wedging themselves between a library and a .sisx file, I’m going to make the following recommendation about building Qt apps for Symbian: drop all your sources into one folder, build, deploy and run. At this point it seems to be very difficult to build and deploy a SUBDIRS project:

• The biggest problem is actually an older issue with multi-library projects in Qt: PRE_TARGETDEPS. LIBS works fine, but you can’t change the destination diractories for the target files nor the lib search paths. This means that your PRE_TARGETDEPS should point into the SDK’s build directory -> compiler directory -> build configuration. There are too many path combinations!
• Even if you somehow managed to make library dependencies work, you can’t create a sis package for SUBDIRS projects.

Not being able to organize source code into libraries will not be such a big hindrance for Symbian-only programs, but it does make it more difficult to manage a cross-platform solution, which is what I was after.