Building qt out of source

Hello

I am using the -prefix option of configure to install Qt in directory other than the default. The problem I encountered is that the .pdb files which are needed for debugging are not copied to the new install directory.

Also one more question
When using the prefix option of configure I noticed that building is still done in the default directory and then the needed files for installation are copied to the install directory, so the -prefix option does not really gives separation of the build and source directory. That is I still need 3 or 4 extra GB during the building of QT which might be issue. Can I somehow specify for the build files to directly go to the prefix directory ?

If not, is it possible to do this by manually changing some of the variables that are specified in the generated make files from configure, like DESTDIR or DESTDIR_TARGET . Will such thing work or that is ridiculous ? I have no experience with makefiles and nmake .

dont run configure from the source directory... make another directory and run configure from there... this will make a shadow build in that directory...
for eg..
C:\qt\qt4.5 = source
C:\qt\build45 = build
then cd to build45 and run ../qt4.5/configure

I tried your suggestion and get the following error

d:\main\dev\sdk\qt2\qt-win-opensource-src-4.5.2\qt-win-opensource-src-4.5.2\qmake\project.h(57) : fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'qscriptengine.h'
: No such file or directory
NMAKE : fatal error U1077: '"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\BIN\cl.EXE"' : return code '0x2'
Stop.
Building qmake failed, return code 2

I just read that the source and build directory must be in the same level,
in my test primer where I am getting the error the source and the build directory are at the same level.
http://doc.trolltech.com/main-snapsh...lds-wince.html

Still, if this shadow build thing will work (which it doesn't at this time)
this is not acceptable for me because the build and source dir must be at the same levels. So is there any other way or workaround to get separate build directory? maybe my idea of manually examining the contents of the makefiles and setting the dest dir ?

ok no ideas ?
I am really stuck with this. I tried to go through the .pro files in the qt source tree, and
assign new values to variables DESTDIR, OBJECTS_DIR and MOC_DIR. I also set
set the new moc.exe and uic.exe path to my build directory in mkspecs/win32msvc2005/qmake.conf.

However nmake still looks for the moc path in my source qt dir/bin instead in my builddir where the moc.exe is placed and gives me error that it can't find moc . Someone can comment this ?

I just can't belive that there is no support for out of source build. I really need this future since I need to store the qt library in source version system , where each user will locally download and build qt.