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For building Qt, you typically have to reserve an hour or so. There’s a much faster way to build it though (besides the optimisations I already described) — build it using jom. Jom is a multi-threaded nmake replacement. The only thing you have to keep in mind is to configure without -fast for versions before 4.6.3; if you configure with -fast, there’s a bug which will lead to Qt being build with a single thread. So just configure as usual, and run jom instead of nmake, your build-times should be drastically reduced.
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