Re: qt: monolithic or modular?

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Efraim Flashner <efraim@flashner.co.il> skribis:

> I try very hard to not build qt
> on my laptop, mostly because of the long build time (7 hours on hydra
> [0]). Currently we download and use the big download of qt[1] and
> frankly I'd rather not. Qt does also ship in smaller bits[2], 32 if I
> counted correctly. I propose we package the submodules and over time
> we go through the packages that use qt and switch out the monolithic
> qt for just the parts that the program actually uses. It makes it less
> daunting to build, should make the closures smaller, and means that if
> a submodule fails to build on an architecture then they only lose that
> module, not all of qt.

I’m all for it!  It may also simplify unbundling as discussed in
<http://bugs.gnu.org/21288>.  (We’ll need a Qt updaters and/or importer
at some point.)

The difficulty is to make sure Qt finds its modules at run time, but the
fact that Nixpkgs uses this approach¹ suggests that it should work.

If you’re willing to work on this, I would suggest creating a branch,
which we’ll build on Hydra when is appropriate.

Thanks,
Ludo’.

¹ https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/development/libraries/qt-5/5.4/default.nix