Configuring QtCreator (and/or qmake) for Ubuntu->Raspbian cross compile

[davethomaspilot]

I've been building Qt applications (Qt4.8) natively on raspberry pi (Raspbian) for some time now, with no issues ( The project has grown -- so now it takes a really long time to compile.

I followed a nice tutorial (Hertaville) to set up cross-compilation on Ubuntu 12 for a Raspbian target. It works, and the performance improvement is huge (10 minutes down to about 30 seconds). However, the resulting flow doesn't use QtCreator, which I now really like and don't want to give up.

So, the cross-compile toolchain is setup and working. The target file system is mounted, which I'd think would eliminate the need to rebuild any Qt binaries, but maybe not?

I tried setting up a Qt version and tool chain in Qt Creator on the Ubuntu machine, but so far, without success. I've seen some issues with how toolchains and Qt versions are set up in QtCreator, and I'm beginning to think those might prevent me from doing what I want to do.

Should I be able to do this somehow, maybe with QMAKESPECS or with qmake variables?

Or, is it necessary to build a qmake from source if I want to use QtCreator to cross-compile (and debug) raspian applications from Ubuntu?