QGIS » QGIS Application

As initially reported on Gentoo, Current versions of QGIS (namely 2.4.0) fail to install with some configurations of recent PyQt4 (in my case PyQt4-4.11.2). The actual error message in this case reads like this:

sip: Unable to find file "QtCore/QtCoremod.sip" 

The actual cause is most likely this other error message, printed during configuration:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "…/qgis-2.4.0/cmake/FindPyQt.py", line 5, in <module>
    import PyQt4.pyqtconfig
ImportError: No module named pyqtconfig

The reason behind this is the fact that according to the PyQt docs the pyqtconfig module has been deprecated and won't be built if the package is configured with the configure-ng.py script instead of the legacy configure.py script. The FindPyQt.py script in QGIS starts out by importing that module, so it fails pretty fast.

I don't know exactly how to retrieve all the information that script obtained without using pyqtconfig. But for some settings I found ways to obtain the same settings, or at least make educated guesses which work in default configurations. I wrote that up in a patch which allows my build to succeed. That patch currently makes use of the sipconfig module, which apparently is destined to go away in SIP version 5, but that hasn't been released yet, so for the time being we can accept that requirement for now.