I was recently trying to build a windows version of the level-set shape generation (initial results, which is really a derivative of JShape), which is now titled MeldShape. The Mac version has come through several revisions now, and I figured if I was going to put anything up here, it might as well include everything (a document, some binaries, as well as a post).

Anyhow, I usually use a cross-compiler to build windows applications, and in the past I haven’t had any trouble getting a working build. However, this time was different.

I have working binaries for most of the libraries that MeldShape depends on, so building MeldShape was just a matter of updating these libraries and fixing any non-portable aspects within MeldShape. There were a few of these little things, like usleep and drand48, and checking validity of a pthread with (pthread_t*) != null (win32 pthread_t is a struct with a pointer inside). These things are obviously straightforward, and wouldn’t have even been an issue had I been thinking of a portable application in the first place. The real problem came within the Qt components.

When cross-compiling on linux for win32 targets, it is relatively straightforward to setup Qt. You use wine to install the windows libraries of Qt (the mingw build) and use your linux qmake with the appropriate spec file. Typically once you get the program to link you are out of the woods. But with Meldshape, linking was fine but running was always giving a symbol error in the Qt dll’s. It didn’t work either in Wine or in windows XP.

This was super frustrating, as I don’t have a working setup in windows using MinGW to build Qt applications. And in my experience, building in MinGW is really slow compared to the cross-compiler, so I really didn’t want to have to setup my environment from scratch (building from source). So I suffered through this problem, trying to figure out why on execution windows was complaining about missing symbols in the Dll (mostly in QtCore4.dll). I have seen similar problems to these when trying to run the executable with mismatched Dll’s (especially between the mingw and msvc builds of Qt), so I figured it had to be something with the versions of the Dll’s. I was using the same version as I had built with, so that was out.

I then tried an older version of Qt (since I had been using an older version in the past), and again no luck. With no other option, I started to strip my app to a barebones sample application to see if even that would work. And sure enough it was working fine (although it wasn’t referencing much else other than QApplication). The problem seemed to be something to do with one of the other libraries I was using.

I struggled with this for a while, and finally came up with the hypotheses that this was maybe due to loading parts of the UI with QUiLoader (from UiTools). After commenting out the few parts that use forms, it actually starts to work ???? This was at the point when I was ready to say, “screw the windows build”. I mean, the application is pretty simple, and at this point it is not even worth the effort. Anyway, I’m sure I am using forms in my other applications, so I have no idea at this point why using forms are causing problems with the Qt in windows. I decide to try QFormBuilder from the QtDesigner components instead. Luckily the API is pretty much the same, so almost no code (except for the declaration of the loader) has to change. Strangely enough, QFormBuilder worked fine.

I have no idea why QUiLoader was causing problems and QFormBuilder was not. I’m happy I found the problem, but at the same time I think the only reason I found it was due to luck. In the end it took almost 6 hours to find the problem and port the rest of the code…something I figured would take maybe 2 hours.

In the next little bit, I will try and upload the binaries and the technical document (as well as create a new project page for it)…all of the things that could have been done in that time it took to track down a non-sense bug.