Script to patch Qt binaries after relocation on Mac OSX

Question

I'm building qt 5 from source. I'm wondering what is the easiest way to copy-paste qt binaries under MacOS. If you run otool on any of the qt frameworks you'll see that all the dependencies are using absolute paths:

    bash-3.2$ otool -L QtWidgets 
QtWidgets:
    /Users/../Qt/qt5/qtbase/lib/QtWidgets.framework/Versions/5/QtWidgets (compatibility version 5.1.0, current version 5.1.1)
    /Users/../Qt/qt5/qtbase/lib/QtGui.framework/Versions/5/QtGui (compatibility version 5.1.0, current version 5.1.1)
    /Users/../Qt/qt5/qtbase/lib/QtCore.framework/Versions/5/QtCore (compatibility version 5.1.0, current version 5.1.1)
    /System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/Carbon (compatibility version 2.0.0, current version 155.0.0)
    /System/Library/Frameworks/Cocoa.framework/Versions/A/Cocoa (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 19.0.0)
    /usr/lib/libz.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.2.5)
    /System/Library/Frameworks/OpenGL.framework/Versions/A/OpenGL (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.0.0)
    /System/Library/Frameworks/AGL.framework/Versions/A/AGL (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.0.0)
    /usr/lib/libc++.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 65.1.0)
    /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 169.3.0)
    /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreFoundation.framework/Versions/A/CoreFoundation (compatibility version 150.0.0, current version 744.18.0)
    /usr/lib/libobjc.A.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 228.0.0)
    /System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Versions/C/Foundation (compatibility version 300.0.0, current version 945.16.0)
    /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/ApplicationServices (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 45.0.0)
    /System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Versions/C/AppKit (compatibility version 45.0.0, current version 1187.37.0)

When I copy qt binaries and link my application against that copy, it works but some dependent frameworks are taken from the old place. The things become even worse when I try to move the binaries to another machine. I know that the problems can be fixed using install_name_tool but it's a lot of error-prone manual work. I'm wondering if there is a script which could help me in that?

Answer 1

After a long search on the Internet. I discovered that Qt Installer Framework has necessary code to patch relocated Qt binaries under Mac OSX. There was small problem to run that code, it's written in C++ that was not that easy to compile since it depends on Qt4 while I'm using Qt5.1. Fortunately, it turned out that all the operations are available via command line. To use that commands you need any installer created with Qt Installer Framework (Qt binary installer for Mac OSX is good enough) and to use the command below:

./qt-mac-opensource-5.1.0-clang-offline.app/Contents/MacOS/qt-mac-opensource-5.1.0-clang-offline --runoperation "QtPatch" "mac"
"/Path/to/Qt/binaries/which/need/to/be/patched" "qt5"
========================================
Operation was successfully performed.

In case you get an error message which says "qmake is not a program" or something like that try to chmod qmake:

chmod 777 qmake

Note: this works with any QtIFW installer. Play around with prebuilt version of QtIFW

OK, that's it, that's the most straight forward way I found so far.

Answer 2

If you are building QT5 from source anyways then static linking will solve some of your headaches.

The original link listed broke.

To build QT statically add -static to the arguments when you run ./configure e.g.

./configure -prefix /Developer/qt -qt-zlib -qt-libpng -qt-libjpeg -universal -sdk /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk -static -release

Compile with: make sub-src

Install with: sudo make install