Re: qt: monolithic or modular?

[Andreas Enge]

On Tue, Apr 05, 2016 at 07:22:20AM +0300, Efraim Flashner wrote:
> 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.

This would be very welcome indeed! It would also make debugging easier (for
instance, Qt-5 currently does not build on arm). If I understand correctly, 
we could in the beginning keep the modules in parallel with a monolithic build
(thanks to different names qt and qtbase) and switch over one package using Qt
after the other?

Since you mentioned incomplete build systems for some modules, would it not
be enough to add qtbase (which includes qmake, I suppose?) to their inputs?

Andreas