[PyQt] Building PyQt5 for embedded Linux systems

[David Boddie]

On Fri Jul 24 16:13:43 BST 2015, Phil Thompson wrote:

> On 24/07/2015 3:33 pm, David Boddie wrote:

> > I imagine that using pyqtdeploy is the preferred way to do this these
> > days.
> > Is that correct?
> 
> No.

OK, that's useful to know, if a bit surprising. I'll explain why below.

> > Can anyone share their experiences with this kind of embedded
> > development using PyQt?
> 
> The traditional problem with embedded systems, as you know, is whether
> it uses a stripped down version of Qt. If it is a full version, but
> without the X11 specific calls, then it would be easy enough to define 
> a
> new SIP feature to disable those when necessary.

I see that I conflated three issues: cross-compiling, X support and
features.

My understanding was that, if you had the toolchain and a set of full
Qt X11 libraries for the target, then you could use pyqtdeploy to build
PyQt for the target. This is the cross-compilation issue which I assume
is solved. Would you use pyqtdeploy for cross-compiling to other
architectures running Qt on X11?

Non-X11 builds are probably simple enough to add support for.

I'm not tracking the evolution of the PyQt configure script these days,
but I don't think there's a nice way to handle feature-reduced builds
without either a lot of work to patch generated sip files or better
support in whatever generates those files.

David