Qt when building Qt from source how do I clean old configure configurations?

Question

I'm compiling Qt from source, but I don't want to extract the source each time I want to build it.

How can I clean previous configuration with the configure tool?

Answer 1

For Qt4 and earlier, try this:

nmake confclean

You can then re-configure and re-compile QT.

As noted in the comments, this no longer works in QT 5. This is due to the fact that the Qt project now uses separate sub-modules for different parts. If you have a local clone of the Qt git repos, you can try calling this from the main Qt directory:

git submodule foreach --recursive "git clean -dfx"

As noted here, there may be some problems if you have a downloaded source archive. The link I posted suggests using a shadow build instead so the process of making a clean configuration is as simple as configuring to build at a new shadow build destination.

Answer 2

As of today (Qt 5.9.0 beta2) there is no confclean target in Linux, and you need to manually remove .config.cache file to reconfigure.

Note that make distclean doesn't help at all.

Answer 3

For the latest versions, use a shadow build, then you can just nuke your directory. My batch file for configuring effectively creates a new folder, moves into it, then calls configure. Then you just go into the shadow directory and run 'jom'. When you want to make a different configuration, just use a different shadow directory. This effectively means that your source tree doesn't get filled with build artifacts, which are impossible to remove when you want a different configuration. Trust me, this is the thing to do....

mkdir shadow_dir
cd shadow_dir
%~dp0\src\configure.bat ....