What surprised me the most is that this is nowhere mentioned if you look at the Qt download page - Not a single word, even though many developers will stumble upon the sane issue. Fixing the IssueĪfter a lot of research and talking to a coworker who happens to be some sort of a Qt Guru I eventually found out the problem: Qt access clang via the Command Line Tools, and these tools are not shipped with every version of Xcode. The trouble starts when you try to compile your code: It won't, because Qt uses clang via the Xcode Command Line Tools. If that error occurs, you can still run Qt based apps on your Mac and the Qt Creator will still start as nothing happened. In addition to that they attempt to configure clang, a C++ compiler, and a failed configuration attempt leads to the already mentioned error message. The setup installs the Qt Creator and the Qt binaries. I needed quite a bit of time and a hint from a colleague to find out what was wrong, and since not everyone has the luck of having a colleague who happens to know the answer to most of the problems Qt offers you, I decided to share the solution to the mysterious error clang install_name_tool failed error - Which is as easy as big the surprise is when the error hits you for the first time. I want to explain what clang is, and why its absence (yes, that error message shall indicate its absence - I was surprised too!) causes the installation to fail.
This is certainly applicable if you want your Qt IDE to run on Windows, but when it comes to OS X you are very likely to run into the installer error clang install_name_tool failed.
I would be happy to provide a patch (remove above mentioned lines) if that helps.Installing Qt is (usually) an easy task: Download the installer, let it do its duty and done you are. My suggestion is for qglobal.h to keep MAC_OS_X_VERSION_MIN_REQUIRED alone and just rely on AvailabilityMacros.h (as anybody else on this platform does). In particular since Mac OS X did change significantly between 10.4 and 10.5 and thus many modern features are not available to the Qt developer.
1068 for Snow Leopard 10.6.8), so forcing the min version to 10.4 is not expected by Mac developers using a more recent operating system. Please also note that the default for MAC_OS_X_VERSION_MIN_REQUIRED would be the currently build-on version (e.g. Qglobal.h does '#include ', which would do the right thing, however, since MAC_OS_X_VERSION_MIN_REQUIRED is already defined it does not override it. See this discussion on the ITK mailinglist: ITK crash on Lion/Qt Above bug leads to ITK using a different type for the reference counter internally than what a program using Qt will use, leading to hard to debug crashes in ITK's smart pointer system. This leads to problems for instance with the widely used Insight Toolkit (ITK), which uses MAC_OS_X_VERSION_MIN_REQUIRED in its itkLightObject to configure reference counting.