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Sounak
Sounak

Reputation: 4968

How to install qt4 for mac el capitan?

I have tried downloading the qt4 dmg files from the archives like (4.7 and 4.8.5). They don't work, during the installation it says, This package is incompatible with this version of OS X and may fail to install.

Then I came across this forum post, which says I need to compile it myself. I don't know exactly how to compile it myself.

I am really confused on how to do this, any help is welcome.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1497

Answers (1)

Jeremy Friesner
Jeremy Friesner

Reputation: 73081

I don't know exactly how to compile it myself.

To compile it yourself, you'll need to have Xcode installed, and the Xcode command line tools configured (you can test to see if the command line tools are available by typing the command g++ into terminal; if it says "error: no input files", they are installed; if it says "command not found", they aren't).

Once you've got that out of the way, you'll need to do something like this:

  1. Download the Qt4.x source code archive with Unix-style line endings (e.g. qt-everywhere-opensource-src-4.8.7.tar.gz ; avoid the .zip version if you can, as the .cpp files in the .zip version have Windows-style line endings and that can complicate things on a Mac)
  2. Unpack the archive (if Safari hasn't already done it for you; e.g. tar xzvf qt-everywhere-opensource-src-4.8.7.tar.gz ) and then move the qt-everywhere-opensource-src folder to somewhere convenient (e.g. to your home directory).
  3. cd into the qt-everywhere-opensource-src-4.8.7 folder
  4. export QTDIR=`pwd`
  5. export PATH=$PATH:$QTDIR/bin
  6. ./configure
  7. make

Note that since the 4.x source code is so old, some of the .cpp files may fail to compile under newer versions of MacOS/X. If that happens, you'll have to hand-edit the .cpp files that failed to compile to tweak them so that they will compile, and then run make again -- to fix the .cpp files, you'll have to know enough C++ to understand what's wrong and how to fix it, although in some cases you can just google the error message and find out what other people did to fix the error in question. If all else fails, you can always comment out the lines where the errors are and hope that they aren't important for what you are doing...

Of course this is all painful and difficult, so if you have any choice at all in the matter I recommend downloading the latest Qt 5.x archive (5.8.0?) instead and using that. You'll have a much easier experience than what you're in for if you try to shoehorn an old Qt version into a new MacOS/X version.

Upvotes: 1

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