develop

Developing VMPK with QtCreator (Qt5)

VMPK may be compiled using two build systems:

• CMake: it is the "official" build system for Linux/Unix packagers and users. Project files: "CMakeLists.txt". See: Developing VMPK with CMake.

• Qmake: it is the Qt's original build system. Ideal for developers. Project files: "*. pro"

Both types of project files can be opened with QtCreator, but only the qmake projects are explained in this page.

Qt5 libraries and QtCreator can be installed using the online installers. available in the Qt project site. They work and look the same for Linux, Windows, and macOS. On Linux and macOS, this method will install everything in $HOME/Qt by default (in C:\Qt\ on Windows). You can choose several Qt5 library versions to be installed at once, using them with a single copy of QtCreator which will be updated when a new version is available, without having to wait for the distribution maintainers to package and publish their packages for you. There are also larger offline installers if you prefer this method (for instance, to install several machines on a classroom with the same single version downloaded only once).

You will need C++ compilers and 3rd party libraries as well. For Linux, you should install a compiler available in your distro (GCC or Clang). For macOS, you need to install Xcode command line tools, in addition to the Xcode application. For Windows, you may use MinGW (included with Qt5) or Visual Studio and debugger, that is available from Microsoft. You should read all about the supported platforms.

Once you installed the development environment, you should download the sources from the Git repository. You need Drumstick and VMPK.

$ git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/drumstick/git drumstick
$ git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/vmpk/git vmpk

You may open both projects, Drumstick and VMPK, at once with QtCreator, This is very comfortable if you need to make changes on both projects at the same time.

You will need some environment variables for building VMPK. On Linux, they would be (for instance):

DRUMSTICKINCLUDES=${HOME}/Projects/drumstick/library/include
DRUMSTICKLIBS=${HOME}/Projects/build-drumstick-Desktop_Qt_5_9_7_GCC_64bit2-Debug/build/lib/
DRUMSTICKRT=${DRUMSTICKLIBS}/drumstick2
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}:${DRUMSTICKLIBS}

Here are the VMPK project settings form, showing the results. There is a practical "Batch edit" button to easily edit the environment variables.

The last variable is LD_LIBRARY_PATH for Linux, DYLD_FRAMEWORK_PATH for macOS, and PATH for Windows. It is not absolutely necessary, if you check the option "Add build library search path to LD_LIBRARY_PATH" in the Run Settings of the project.

Final warning: you should use the same Qt5 version for both projects Drumstick and VMPK, with the same Debug or Release configuration! And please read the fine manual!