Qt for the Symbian Platform (aka Qt for S60) and the TP1

Hi, I just wanna give you a small update on how the Qt 4.6.0 TP1 and the Qt port to Symbian/S60 works together. Here is the short version:

Keep using the "Tower" pre-release unless you know what you're doing :D

Now, for those still reading here is some more details. We've integrated the port into the Qt 4.6 codeline, so now we're releasing together with the other platforms. With the "Tower" release which is 4.5 based, we had both QtScript and QtWebKit working fine - this is not the case for this release. There are two reasons for this:

1) Not all changes we did in QtWebKit for the "Tower" release has been pushed or admitted upstream. And we'd rather spend the extra time it takes to get it right in the WebKit trunk instead of hacking it together for the TP1 release in some special Qt version. Please be patient, this is the right way to do it.

2) We've changed the backend of QtScript to use the Javascript engine in WebKit. And since that's not working yet, well - QtScript is not working either.

So what can I use the TP1 for then? Well, if you want to try out new stuff in 4.6 NOT relying on QtScript nor QtWebKit, and if you have access to the RVCT compiler, you can build the src package. Make sure to use this configure line:

configure -platform win32-msvc2008 -xplatform symbian-abld -no-script

You can also use -platform win32-g++ if you feel like it. Btw, if you don't understand the -platform vs the -xplatform stuff, let me enlighten you a bit. Simply said, the platform you're developing on is the -platform, and the platform you're developing for is the -xplatform. Up to and including "Tower" we used the "Nokia Carbide C/C++ Compiler for Windows/x86" aka mwccsym2, but we can't do that anymore after we removed the old ANSI support in Qt for 4.6 (see this blog post for more details on the change). That means if you want to build Qt from the src package, you need either g++ or Visual Studio Express Edition in addition to RVCT. We require RVCT 2.2 build 686. If you have an earlier version of RVCT you'll need to remove --visibility_inlines_hidden from the QMAKE_CXXFLAGS.ARMCC line in mkspecscommonsymbiansymbian.conf. At the moment we don't support RVCT 3.x nor 4.x.

I know most of you don't have RVCT, so we're working hard on getting daily binary snapshots created. That way you don't have to spend time and money on getting the src package built, and can instead just get directly to hacking. I'll update with a new blog entry once binary snapshots are up and running.

Btw. have a look at this blog post for instructions on how to get Tower working on Linux. Hopefully we can make it easier in the future :D