This is a followup to this question How to create a subdirectory for a project in qt-creator?, where the first answer didn't work for me.
I resolved it by manually writing every file into the main .pro file, which is not that much harder, but I still wonder - how exactly .pri files work, and why the solution linked above didn't add the folders, but only the .pri files, so it looked like this in Qt creator:
So, my questions are:
- What is the general format of the .pri files?
- Why the solution above doesn't work?
Answer
The format of the .pri files is exactly the same as the format of the .pro files. The main difference is one of intent; a .pro is what most people would expect to run qmake on directly, while a .pri is to be included by a .pro. When you instruct qmake to include another file, it just processes the commands in that file as if it were in the current file.
The last time I looked at Qt Creator, it would do additional parsing and recognize that .pri files were separate, and list any headers/sources/ui/rc/pri files from that file specifically as a subdirectory, much like you see the include.pri files listed in the screenshot of this question.