Debug build configuration looks for nonexistent libraries

[Alex Taylor]

Switching a Qt4 project to debug mode with

CONFIG += debug console

causes build to fail with the error message

weakld: cannot open library file '<path>\QtGuid_s.a'

which is caused by the generated Makefile line

LIBS = -Le:\usr\lib -lQtGuid -lQtCored

A search both locally and using 'yum provides' indicates that no library named QtGuid* exists anywhere.

Changing the above Makefile line to specify -lQtGui4 and -lQtCore4 allows build to complete, although presumably debug traces within the Qt4 runtime itself will not be possible.

[Silvan Scherrer]

thats a known issue. To have this possibility you need to build Qt4 debug yourself. This will all change with Qt5

[Alex Taylor]

Noted, thanks.

Maybe it would be worth putting a mention of this on the qt4 trac wiki?

[Dmitry A. Kuminov]

Well, it's not an issue, strictly speaking. It's the Qt design. It behaves the same way also on Windows and on Mac. Debug builds of libraries get special "d" suffixes there ("debug" in case of Mac). So the same applies when linking to these libraries in debug mode. And it actually makes sense as if you want to debug your app you will usually build Qt yourself — as debugging it otherwise is quite meaningless w/o the Qt debug information as you already noticed.

However, I created ​https://github.com/bitwiseworks/qtbase-os2/issues/30 to reconsider this subject in Qt5. Closing this here.