Building Qt on Windows…

Building Qt (4.5.1) on Windows in a Fusion virtual machine with limited disk space is an adventure… :)  The build eats endless Gigabytes. Unfortunately the configure.exe is a bit limited and doesn’t allow to disable building of the demos and the examples.

After getting some hints and ideas by googling I did the following steps:

1. I did run configure.exe with the -fast option. According to configure.exe -help, -fast only creates Makefiles for library and subdirectory targets.
2. Then I entered the src directory (that is the source directory for the libraries) and called nmake. That way qt builds only the libraries without the demos or examples.
3. After  the library build finished, I called nmake clean in the src directory. make clean removes all temporary stuff in the src directory (like the obj files) but NOT the finished libraries and binaries from the top level bin and lib directory.

If you don’t plan to rebuild the libraries the third step frees up about 5 Gigabytes(!) of disk space. I wouldn’t recommend cleaning the src directory if rebuilding is required though. Building the libraries takes several hours…