Category: Qt

Over the last couple of weeks I did several major improvements to the QMake-based build setup guitone uses: The project file comes now with one target to create a tarball, one to create a Mac OS X disk image containing all the needed Qt libraries and one target to install the application, which can be configured to use all the options you know from autotool-based projects (like PREFIX, BINDIR or DESTDIR, to name a few).

But yes, there was one task which was yet missing there – one to automatically create a Win32 installer. The steps to produce that had been so far:

1. enter the to-be-packaged version in the InnoSetup script file
2. convert the supplied text files from Unix to DOS line endings, while giving them a .txt extension
3. call the InnoSetup compiler on the script file and create the executable

Especially the first and second action looked hard to automate, given the fact that Windows does not come with a rich set of tools to process text streams – and requiring a Cygwin installation just for using sed seemed awkward to me. Obviously other people had similar problems before and somebody proposed to emulate sed with a VBScript which would be executed by the Windows Scripting Host (WSH). Wow, cool thing – if I’d just remember my broken Visual Basic knowledge. But didn’t Microsoft have this Javascript Look-a-Like, JScript? Shouldn’t this be executable as well?

Apparently it was and I sat down to hack an improved JScript sed version:

var patterns = new Array();
var replacements = new Array();
var argcount = 0;

for (var i=0; icscript and to combine everything for a proper QMake target. Here we go:

DOCFILES="NEWS README README.driver COPYING"
...
win32 {
    isEmpty(QTDIR):QTDIR           = "c:\Qt\4.6.2"
    isEmpty(MINGWDIR):MINGWDIR     = "c:\MinGW"
    isEmpty(OPENSSLDIR):OPENSSLDIR = "c:\OpenSSL"
    isEmpty(ISCC):ISCC = "c:\Program Files\Inno Setup 5\ISCC.exe"
    
    win32setup.depends  = make_first
    win32setup.target   = win32setup
    win32setup.commands = \
        cscript //NoLogo res\win32\sed.js \
            s/@@VERSION@@/$${VERSION}/ \
            s/@@QTDIR@@/$${QTDIR}/ \
            s/@@MINGWDIR@@/$${MINGWDIR}/ \
            s/@@OPENSSLDIR@@/$${OPENSSLDIR}/ \
            < res\win32\guitone.iss.in > res\win32\guitone.iss && \
        ( for %%f in ($$DOCFILES) do \
            cscript //NoLogo res\win32\sed.js \
                s/\n\$$/\r\n/ \
                < %%f > %%f.txt ) && \
        \"$$ISCC\" res\win32\guitone.iss && \
        ( for %%f IN ($$DOCFILES) do del %%f.txt )
    
    QMAKE_EXTRA_TARGETS += win32setup
}

So if you know enough Javascript you can probably emulate whatever tool you’re missing on Win32 without having to depend on any external dependency. Very cool!

So for some weird reason my application was not closable from the Mac OS X dock – it quit properly when you selected “Quit” from the application menu or hit the Cmd-Q shortcut – but the dock menu’s quit action was completely ignored.

While debugging the issue I hooked into `QApplication::notify(QObject *, QEvent *)` and noted that a `QCloseEvent` was send to my application… wait, what? A `QCloseEvent`? Yes, I also thought that these kinds of events would only be send to widgets, namely, top level widgets, but I got one for my application, and Qt plainly ignored it. So I went further ahead and tried to quit the application directly when the event occured, similar to this

bool MyApp::event(QEvent * ev)
{
    bool eaten = false;
    switch (ev->type())
    {
        // other stuff ...
#ifdef Q_WS_MAC:
        case QEvent::Close:
        {
            quit();
            eaten = true;
            break;
        }
#endif
        default:
            eaten = QCoreApplication::event(ev);
            break;
    }
    return eaten;
}

but this didn’t work out so nicely: while the application quitted correctly, the `quit()` slot was apparently called twice in a row. My guess is that Qt ignores the `quitOnLastWindowClosed` property – which I’ve set to false – and since I close all windows in the quit slot it executes quit again, or something else, so I decided to just close all open windows when the `QCloseEvent` arrived – without calling `quit()` directly, and tada, my application quitted and the slot was also only called once. (This was a mistake on my side because I missed a break.)

I’m proud to announce the third release candidate of guitone 1.0.
This release fixes some critical bugs and also adds support for
drag’n’drop renames in the workspace amongst other minor improvements.

The complete list of changes is as always listed in NEWS. A Mac OS X
binary is also already available, a package for Windows will follow
tomorrow.

I’m still looking for translators – if you’re interested, please drop me
a note.