Building the Recoll Mac OS X bundle with QT Creator

The following steps should enable you to build the installation bundle which is described as the hybrid approach here.

It works up to recoll 1.40.4. I need to update it for 1.41 because this now uses libmagic, which needs a special build.

The Recoll.app application is built with Qt Creator, using .pro qmake files. Xapian is also built through a qmake file, this makes it easier to use the appropriate invocations. The Qt macdeployqt tool is used to produce the .dmg

Install Qt Creator. See the Qt Web site. You will be using the Qt installer, and install a Qt version in addition to Creator. The installer will also pull Apple XCode command line tools as needed.
Create a directory named Recoll in your home. You could also locate the build, elsewhere, but you will then have to fix a value in the final dmg building script which expects this location.
Extract the Recoll and antiword source from the framagit repositories:

cd ~/Recoll
git clone https://framagit.org/medoc92/recoll
git clone https://framagit.org/medoc92/recoll-antiword antiword

Download and extract xapian-core 1.4.24 into the top directory (~/Recoll). You can use a different xapian version, but you will have to fix the version in the appropriate .pro file.
Build antiword.

cd antiword
make -f Makefile.Linux

Prepare recoll

cd ~/Recoll/recoll
cp src/common/autoconfig-mac.h src/common/autoconfig.h
cp src/qtgui/recoll.pro.in src/qtgui/recoll.pro
cp src/common/autoconfig-mac.h src/common/autoconfig.h

Build. We will be using qmake files located under src/qmake in the recoll tree: libxapian.pro, librecoll.pro, recollindex.pro and recollq.pro, and src/qtgui/recoll.pro (created above) for the GUI.
If your Qt version is not 6.7.3 (quite probable), you need to edit files and change the Qt_6_7_3 value in the macx section of each .pro file and also in the packaging/mac/mac-recoll-dmg.sh script.
Start Qt Creator and load the project files. Go to the projects pane, and for each project, select the Qt version in Build & Run, select the Release configuration in Build Settings and adjust the build directory in General by adding a subdirectory with the project name. E.g. for librecoll, change: …/recoll/src/qmake/build/Qt_6_7_3-Release/… to …/recoll/src/qmake/build/librecoll/Qt_6_7_3-Release/…
Build libxapian.pro then librecoll.pro then the rest in any order.
Build the .dmg. Some local adjustments may be needed in the script, depending on the Qt version and installation location.
```
cd ~/Recoll
sh recoll/src/packaging/mac/make-recoll-dmg.sh
```

This should give you a .dmg