Static versions of libs

AndyE

Does the online installer / maintenance tool have the option to provide static versions of the Qt libraries?

Note: we have a commercial not open-source licence (if that makes any difference).

TIA.

jsulm

@AndyE No, it does not. As far as I know also not for commercial license users (but I may be wrong, you should ask QtCompany directly).

AndyE

I will do that but assuming their answer is no different, I'm guessing the only other option is to build from source.

AndyE

Decided to build from source anyway as it's good learning process.

Axel Spoerl

As @jsulm rightfully said, shipping an application statically linked to Qt requires a commercial license.
@AndyE please do talk to your account manager for that purpose.

Technically it's not really complicated. This document is a good starting point.

AndyE

@Axel-Spoerl said in Static versions of libs:

As @jsulm rightfully said, shipping an application statically linked to Qt requires a commercial license.
@AndyE please do talk to your account manager for that purpose.

Technically it's not really complicated. This document is a good starting point.

See above in my first post...

Note: we have a commercial not open-source licence (if that makes any difference).

I'm currently on my third attempt to build from source :-)

First one, ran out of heap space at which point I realised I'd opened the wrong Visual Studio command prompt and was building 32-bit versions of the libraries using the 32-bit compiler and that was the complete opposite of what I wanted.

Second time, did the whole thing only to realise when I had no Debug libraries that the Windows config option to build both Debug and Release is NOT "-debug -release" and is in fact "-debug-and-release".

Edit: I've had better more coordinated days than today.

AndyE

As an aside the documentation for installing "-debug-and-release" builds for Windows really should be updated...

https://forum.qt.io/topic/139589/cmake-install-of-qt-build-does-not-install-debug-artifacts

https://forum.qt.io/topic/130545/debug-dlls-are-not-installed/3

Axel Spoerl

My personal experience with static builds is pretty much limited to qtbase.
I use it for small apps, that have to run out-of-the-box e.g. during CI provisioning.
The compilation itself is pretty straight forward. Adding -static to the configure command does the job.
I always try to use the oldest stable Qt version available, just to avoid version conflicts with libraries that aren't part of the static build. ICU is one of the offenders that has caused me headaches.
I also try to build as little of Qt as possible, e.g. just core and network.

Haven't tried complex builds so far, but at least webengine won't work....

AndyE

I built everything that was downloaded in the source folder. Build went fine third time round and once I found "ninja install:Debug" I was able to create and build a new app, and run it in the debugger under Visual Studio. All good.

I have raised a bug on the docs and I expect at some point, they will get updated.

Edit: Might as well mark this as solved. I have static versions of the libs both debug and release.