Does QT actually call VCVARSALL.BAT?

rox271 · wrote on 7 Sept 2013, 11:34

Environment: VStudio Express 2012, Qt 5.x, Windows 7 64 Home premium
Issue: I have to manually call VCVARSALL.BAT before Qt or it doesn't find cl.exe.

Having checked compiler settings, it looks like everything is well detected. So I come to the conclusion that VCVARSALL.BAT is not called by QT during initialization.

Is that a bug? I see many people reporting this "missing cl.exe" issue and looks like no clear action or root cause was identified so far.

sierdzio · wrote on 7 Sept 2013, 13:25

When on Windows, I usually use VisualStudio's cmd and add Qt stuff to PATH. Works well.

rox271 · wrote on 8 Sept 2013, 11:04

[quote author="sierdzio" date="1378560342"]When on Windows, I usually use VisualStudio's cmd and add Qt stuff to PATH. Works well.[/quote]
I am using Qt Creator as a main editor, not Visual Studio. This used to be very simple and effective with Qt4. Now something is broken since Qt5 and Digia.

JKSH · wrote on 11 Oct 2013, 00:05

To check if Qt Creator correctly initializes MSVC, see Tools -> Options -> Build & Run -> Compilers

!http://i.imgur.com/6x53fV8.png(vcvarsall.bat in Qt Creator 4.8.1)!

tobias.hunger · wrote on 11 Oct 2013, 18:09

Check the build environment in projects mode/Kit-name/Build. Does it contain everything you need? It should have everything from vcvarswhatever.bat.

If it does not, then please file a bug report and add whatever is missing as a work around.

AnatolyS · wrote on 25 Jan 2014, 20:07

I observe the same problem. My configuration is the latest Qt 5.2.0 + Qt Creator 3.0.0, Visual Studio 2012 Express, Windows SDK For Windows 8.1, Windows 8.1 64bit.

I installed everything on clean machine in the following order:

Windows SDK (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/desktop/bg162891)
Visual Studio 2012 Express (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34673)
Qt has been installed with the Qt Online Installer for Windows (http://download.qt-project.org/official_releases/online_installers/1.5/qt-windows-opensource-1.5.0-x86-online.exe)

As the result I got
!http://files.rsdn.ru/12237/qtversions.PNG(Qt Versions)!
!http://files.rsdn.ru/12237/qtcompilers.PNG(Compilers)!
!http://files.rsdn.ru/12237/qtkits.PNG(Qt Kits)!

But when add the Qt 5.2.0 MSVC2012 32 bit kit to my project, building environment contains nothing related to Visual Studio 2012 compiler (INCLUDE, PATH, LIB and so on)
!http://files.rsdn.ru/12237/qtproject.PNG(Project)!

What's wrong?

Thank in advance.

BR,
AnatolyS

JKSH · wrote on 21 Feb 2014, 14:52

Very strange. I don't know what's going on, but this user seems to have found a way around the issue: http://qt-project.org/forums/viewreply/163521/

AnatolyS · wrote on 21 Feb 2014, 19:51

Dear JKSH!

Yes , this is workaround but this is not solution. Imagine that I can have both 2010 and 2012 studio (actually it is so). In that case I have to restart the qt creator switching between 2010 and 2012.

Remark that this applies to express versions. On my work machine (windows 7 pro + visual studio 2010 pro + qt 5.2.1) there is no such problem.

JKSH · wrote on 22 Feb 2014, 02:16

If you're willing, please post a bug report at https://bugreports.qt-project.org/ and attach your screenshots.

This might help the Qt Creator team find a proper solution.

I don't think the problem is with Express -- I use MSVC 2012 and MSVC 2013 Express with Qt Creator, with no issues.

AnatolyS · wrote on 22 Feb 2014, 09:26

I have reported here https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTCREATORBUG-11539

Thank you for your time JKSH!

AnatolyS · wrote on 23 Feb 2014, 09:28

[quote author="JKSH" date="1393035362"]
I don't think the problem is with Express -- I use MSVC 2012 and MSVC 2013 Express with Qt Creator, with no issues.[/quote]

I found one moment that may became cause of the problem. This is profile name. On my work machine I have latin profile name
APPDATA=C:\Users\Stranger\AppData\Roaming, but on home machine there is cyrillic profile name:
APPDATA=C:\Users\Толик\AppData\Roaming

JKSH · wrote on 26 Feb 2014, 01:13

Great; thank you for your report! I hope it can help fix this issue.

raymond · wrote on 13 Mar 2014, 14:10

Hi :) Found this post while searching for "'cl' is not recognized as an internal or external command". I got this message in Qt Creator building a project with Qt 4.8.5 and MSVC 2010. Strange thing since it worked earlier today.

I found the reason and solution for me: an application I had installed in the mean time (between working and non working compiling in Creator) had wiped out my System PATH variable. Luckily I was able to recover it using this post on SuperUser: http://superuser.com/a/265575

Might not be relevant for the original posters problem, but others may end up here like me searching for the same problem. :)

AnatolyS · wrote on 29 Mar 2014, 07:53

Daniel Teske has found workaround: https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTCREATORBUG-11539

You should redirect TMP to path without non-latin non-space characters. For example TMP=c:\tmp works fine.

ronjouch · wrote on 6 Jun 2016, 15:31

Hey. This topic ranks high in Google searches for similar problem, so I'm adding that users of Qt 5.7.0 / MSVC2015 might hit what looks like a QTCreator bug, where QTCreator incorrectly runs VC's initialization script. See QTCREATORBUG-16397 - MSVC2015 builds fail due to calling architecture-specific vcvars with architecture parameter.

DY Kim · 8 Nov 2017, 05:49

I have experienced same thing. All environment variables related with VC was not set automatically when QtCreator launched. I solved the issue by changing Windows account name. If the account name has some special characters(like "&"), it seems the environment values are not parsed properly during invoking vcvar.

jsulm · D DY Kim 8 Nov 2017, 00:32

@DY-Kim I would avoid using such user names as user names are part of paths like c:\users\USER_NAME
If a user name contains characters which have special meaning for the CMD/shell then you can expect troubles like what you described.