Notes for setting up your build environment on OSX

These are some rough notes, prior to making a full document.

Qt

Because we maintain compatibility with both Qt4 and Qt5, DB4S developers generally build against Qt4. This ensures no Qt5-only code is added until we've decided to move to Qt5 only.

An easy way to install Qt4 is through Homebrew:

$ brew install qt

This will work perfectly fine for most DB4S development. The only downside to it is the lack of debugging information on the Qt function calls themselves. So, if you experience some kind of crash in DB4S, a stacktrace won't let you productively double click (in Qt Creator) on any Qt function calls. Doing that will just open an assembler view on the output, which is generally not useful.

To compile Qt4 with debugging information included isn't difficult. It's just a bit more time consuming:

$ brew install openssl
$ git clone git://code.qt.io/qt/qt.git
$ cd qt
$ ./configure -prefix $HOME/Qt4 -debug-and-release -opensource -confirm-license -fast -system-zlib \
    -qt-libtiff -qt-libpng -qt-libjpeg -nomake demos -nomake examples -cocoa -openssl-linked \
    -I/usr/local/opt/openssl/include -L/usr/local/opt/openssl/lib -arch x86_64 -no-webkit
$ make -j6
$ make -j1 install

The above configures Qt4 appropriately (using options copied from the Homebrew build), compiles it using 6 threads (the -j6), then installs it into a Qt4 subdirectory under your home directory.

The -j1 on the make install line is important. The Qt4 docs mention a race condition in the install logic, making any use of a higher -j number there a bad idea.

Compiling DB Browser for SQLite for 3.10.0 (including development versions)

Compiling DB4S with Qt4 now seems to require this qmake line in Build Settings → Build Steps → qmake → Additional arguments:

QMAKE_CXXFLAGS="-std=c++11 -stdlib=libc++ -mmacosx-version-min=10.10" QMAKE_LFLAGS="-std=c++11 -stdlib=libc++ -mmacosx-version-min=10.10" CONFIG+=sqlcipher