Notes for setting up your build environment on macOS

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

Qt

We removed support for Qt4 after our version 3.9.1 release. We now require Qt5 instead.

An easy way to install it is through Homebrew:

$ brew install qt5

This will work fine for most DB4S development. The only downside is a 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 Qt5 with debugging information included isn't difficult. It's just a bit more time consuming. The official Qt instructions are here:

https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/osx-building.html

Or you can cheat, and copy the options from the Homebrew formula:

https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/master/Formula/qt5.rb

If you copy the Homebrew formula options, make sure you replace the -release line with -debug-and-release so debugging information gets kept.

It's also useful to use more than one thread when compiling. Do that by adding a -j option to the make command line. eg make -j6 to compile with 6 threads in parallel. This speeds up Qt compile time significantly. 6 threads are fine for a quad core CPU, use more threads (or less) depending on how many cores you have in your system.