This commit comes from a patch submitted to the qt dev team:

  https://codereview.qt-project.org/100430

The patch was reviewed and rejected because Qt4 was in maintenance mode and this was quite a large change.
Nevertheless, the patch has been used successfully with both MSVC 2008 and MSVC 2010.
In particular, it has been used to create Qt opensource builds for Windows CE using VS2008.

The patch was based on changes in Qt5 to support Freetype on Windows.

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Known problems / concerns:

- Some Windows code under examples does not build due to assumptions
- about the FontEngine.  Just needs fixing..
- text.pri is a mess
- Had to modify one line in Freetype source bundled with Qt.
- Did I add leaky abstractions???
- MS's 2008 CRTL is very weak and buggy.  Can it be trusted?
- Regressions to MingGW / GCC cross compilation.
- Did not explicitly follow Qt coding standard, but this can be easily
- addressed later.

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Merged in patch from:

  https://fami.codefreak.ru/mirrors/qt/unofficial_builds/qt4.8.7-msvc2015/02-fix_build_with_msvc2015-45e8f4ee.diff

to allow qt4 webkit to be compiled with Visual Studio 2015

Merged in other tweaks to get examples to build.

Ran test build with Visual Studio 2017. I configured QT build for VS 2015, but ran build against VS 2017 tool chain.

build-qt.cmd and the .cmd helpers under build-targets are intended to make qt easier to build from source.

build-qt.cmd takes three arguments (-h for help).
These arguments specify the build-target, the build-task, and the tool-chain to use.

eg.

build-qt.cmd Desktop build msvc2017

The build-targets are .cmd (batch) libaries stored in the build-targets folder.
Each build target must implement the :configure and :build functions.
See build-targets\Desktop.cmd for an example.

The intention of the build targets is to make experimenting with different qt configurations simpler.
qt already supports different "platforms", which are defined under the mkspecs folder.
I consider these places to fine tune builds for the underlying platform.

But since qt's configure utility has many options that can drastically affect the functionality and size of the final build,
I decided to implement these build target helpers as a way to facilitate experimentation.

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The build-process happens out of tree.
build-qt.cmd expects to have write-permissions to its parent folder.
It creates a build folder formed from a mashup of:
  - the git branch name,
  - the git SHA of HEAD,
  - the build-target,
  - the tool-chain

eg.

4.8-ee3698-Desktop-msvc2017

=====================================

Further commits are planned to build-qt.cmd and build-targets to refine and document the process.

It needs some work and I have not tried it.
But it should be simple enough to massage into shape.

…g directory contains