Copperspice with Qt Creator set up . NEED HELP

[morion]

Hi,
I'm a new user and willing to try CopperSpice out. I am on windows 10 and have downloaded the 32 bit binaries.
I want to use Qt Creator and mingw to create GUI apps. I tried to follow the instructions here https://www.copperspice.com/docs/cs_overview/sample-toolchain.html , but I get the error that Ninja is missing when I try to build KitchenSink.

Here is what I have done :

• Downloaded and Installed Copperspice 1.6. Install Directory is C:\CopperSpice

• I have mingw installed in C:\MinGW (Was using it for other projects). My mingw installation wraps around these basic tools ( binutils 2.33.1, GCC 9.2.0, mingw-w64 7.0.0).

• I have mysys64 installed in C:\msys64

• I have Qt creator 4.11.0 Installed and Configuring a copperspice kit as per https://www.copperspice.com/docs/cs_overview/sample-toolchain.html. However it seems the Qt creator user interface has changed since the guide was written , and I tried to match the instruction as much as I could. Here is a screenshot of my configuration : https://i.ibb.co/xzy4BMX/creator.png

• I have CMake 3.16 installed at the specified directory.

With this set up I believed I could load the KitchenSink project and build it. But when I try to do that, I get this output

Code: Select all

Running Windows Runtime device detection.
No winrtrunner.exe found.
Running Windows Runtime device detection.
No winrtrunner.exe found.
Running Windows Runtime device detection.
No winrtrunner.exe found.
2020-04-13T08:23:24 Clang Code Model: Error: The clangbackend executable "C:\Qt\Qt5.14.0\Tools\QtCreator\bin\clangbackend.exe" could not be started (timeout after 10000ms).
Running C:\Program Files\CMake\bin\cmake.exe C:/Users/Gakwaya/Downloads/KitchenSink-1.6.3 -GNinja "-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE:STRING=Debug" "-DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER:STRING=C:/MinGW/bin/g++.exe" "-DCMAKE_C_COMPILER:STRING=C:/MinGW/bin/gcc.exe" "-DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH:STRING=C:\CopperSpice\cmake\copperspice" in C:\Users\Gakwaya\AppData\Local\Temp\QtCreator-bagtBB\qtc-cmake-cNKiACYY.
CMake Error: CMake was unable to find a build program corresponding to "Ninja".  CMAKE_MAKE_PROGRAM is not set.  You probably need to select a different build tool.
-- Configuring incomplete, errors occurred!
See also "C:/Users/Gakwaya/AppData/Local/Temp/QtCreator-bagtBB/qtc-cmake-cNKiACYY/CMakeFiles/CMakeOutput.log".
CMake process exited with exit code 1.

and I believe what I might be missing is Ninja. I'm not a wizard in build systems and CMake so I might be missing something here ?
Would anybody help point out what I'm doing wrong or missing?
Thanks.

[barbara]

Thank you so much for your detailed report, this makes it a bit easier to help out. Good to know someone is using the 32-bit version still although all of the information will apply to the 64-bit version as well.

(1)

I get the error that Ninja is missing when I try to build KitchenSink. (From QtCreator)CMake was unable to find a build program corresponding to "Ninja"

Yes, you will need to install the Ninja program which is used as part of the CMake build process. It is a very simple program to download and install. Ninja is used instead of Make.

https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja/releases

(2)

My mingw installation wraps around these basic tools ( binutils 2.33.1, GCC 9.2.0, mingw-w64 7.0.0)

The next issue to address is the version of your compiler. To verify this, please type "gcc --version" at a bash command prompt. MinGW is the Windows port of GCC. Something is a bit odd as it would not make sense to be using both version 9.2 and 7.0.

For C++17 support we require at least GCC 7.3, this is what we used to build CopperSpice (CS) and KitchenSink (KS). If you want to build KS you will need to match our version.

If you want to use a newer version of GCC on Windows you will need to first build CS and then build KS. Mixing versions of GCC is usually ok on Unix systems.

Please let us know what happens after you install Ninja and find out the version of GCC so we can provide additional support.

Barbara

[CandL]

Something to consider .... since you are on windows, did you consider using the MSVS 2019 Community Edition compiler? Notice I said compiler and not IDE.

I concur that ninja is the right builder to combine with CMake ... it is fast and does a good job.

I would start off building a HelloWorld app with NO Qt'isms first just to make sure you can build and link.

I will be doing this exact thing in my "real job".... but I will also be making the build work in what is known as a continuous integration build using Jenkins.

Currently at the "real job" my compilers are to old ... as in MSVS 2015 , but I hope to see MSVS 2017/2019 in the next few weeks.

Don't loose the faith, I have not.