Freeciv

Matt Jolly wrote:

or why it's not a straightforward version check - later Qt releases should just make this information available via pkg-config.

Latest Qt versions do, but older, yet still supported, versions do not. We can't yet rely on the existence of the .pc -file.

Marko Lindqvist wrote in #note-3:

Matt Jolly wrote:

or why it's not a straightforward version check - later Qt releases should just make this information available via pkg-config.

Latest Qt versions do, but older, yet still supported, versions do not.

6.4 is the first version that had them from the beginning: https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-86080

I've asked the impacted user to try the patch; I haven't repro'd the issue so I can't say anything other than "it still works" when applied to 3.1.4!

Qt 6.4 went EoS/EoL back in 2023 - I assume that you're still targeting distros pinned to an older version? A quick glance over https://repology.org/project/qt/versions suggests that this may not be a huge concern, pretty much everyone is on 5.15 or >= 6.4 (or provides an upgrade path to a release that supports it), including macports and debian (bookworm got 6.4 as a backport, trixie has 6.8). With 6.5 and 6.8 being current LTS releases, it's not really much of a stretch to drop support for versions older than 6.4, if only to avoid edge cases like this because we can consistently rely on pkg-config.

I'll let you know when I hear back from our user :)

Ah, you're a step ahead of me!

I tried to do some testing quickly in an Alpine 3.15 container (Qt 6.2.1).

It looks like, even with old meson, you should be able to rely on the Qt module for the dependency - with no pkg-config it can use qmake (or CMake iirc) to identify the dependency:

Run-time dependency qt6 (modules: Core, Gui, Widgets) found: YES 6.2.1 (qmake)
Checking if "qt minver" with dependency qt6 compiles: NO 

meson.build:3180:4: ERROR: Problem encountered: Qt6 >= 6.0 required for qt-client in Qt6 mode, but not found

With the `qtfine` checks removed, I get

Run-time dependency gtk4 found: NO (tried pkgconfig and cmake)
qmake found: YES (/usr/bin/qmake) 6.2.1
Run-time dependency qt6 (modules: Core, Gui, Widgets) found: YES 6.2.1 (qmake)
Detecting Qt6 tools
qmake found: YES (/usr/bin/qmake) 6.2.1
Run-time dependency qt6 (modules: Core) found: YES 6.2.1 (qmake)
Program /usr/lib/qt6/bin/moc found: NO
Program moc-qt6 found: NO
Program moc found: YES 6.2.1 (/usr/lib/qt6/libexec/moc)
Program /usr/lib/qt6/bin/uic found: NO
Program uic-qt6 found: NO
Program uic found: YES 6.2.1 (/usr/lib/qt6/libexec/uic)
Program /usr/lib/qt6/bin/rcc found: NO
Program rcc-qt6 found: NO
Program rcc found: YES 6.2.1 (/usr/lib/qt6/libexec/rcc)
Program /usr/lib/qt6/bin/lrelease found: NO
Program lrelease-qt6 found: NO
Program lrelease found: NO
Build targets in project: 52
/freeciv # ninja -C build
. . .
439/439] Linking target freeciv-qt
/freeciv # 

I didn't bind anything into the build container so I can't actually test the built client, however this suggests that the check is superfluous in meson and could be replaced with qt_dep = dependency('Qt6', modules: ['Core', 'Gui', 'Widgets'], version: '>= 6.x.y', required: true) without anyone really noticing the difference.