yarpview does not start when installed from robotology-full-installer-2020.02-win64

[traversaro]

This could be something related to some old vcpkg dependency, or something else.
To investigate this it could be useful to:

• Try to run yarpview from robotology-full-installer-2020.02-win64 on another laptop different from mine (tested by @pattacini in yarpview does not start when installed from robotology-full-installer-2020.02-win64 #354 (comment))
• Try to recompile YARP from source against the dependencies installed by robotology-dependencies-installer-2020.02-win64.exe, and see if the problem persists
• Try to recompile YARP from source against the dependencies installed by a recent vcpkg, and see if the problem persists (I guess @pattacini you already have this configuration to test?)

[pattacini]

On my system, yarpview is working although it's quite difficult to reconstruct the history of how the dependencies have been compiled as I've updated vcpkg without rebuilding the dependencies since quite long.

My suggestion is to rely on Free Windows VM and make use of VS2019 community release in case it is needed.

[pattacini]

Another possibility is to use Windows Sandbox.

[pattacini]

Using the sandbox approach I can confirm the problem exists.

[drdanz]

Does yarpscope start?
This might be related to qml and/or to the opengl setup

[traversaro]

Does yarpscope start?
This might be related to qml and/or to the opengl setup

I did not tried yarpscope, but I successfully used:

• yarpmanager
• yarpmotorgui

[drdanz]

Since the iCubGui has the same issue, I'd say it's an opengl problem...

[traversaro]

Since the iCubGui has the same issue, I'd say it's an opengl problem...

Note that the iCub_SIM instead is working correctly.

[traversaro]

Possibly related issues:

• Qt problems with latest Qt from vcpkg #134
• Rewrite yarpview and yarpscope without QML yarp#2077
• yarpview / yarpscope crash on WSL using Xming yarp#2071

[traversaro]

As Qt 5.14 is now relocatable (see https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-is-relocatable) it could perhaps make sense to wait for vcpkg to include Qt 5.14 (see microsoft/vcpkg#10009) and then test again.

[traversaro]

I tried with a vcpkg build from vcpkg tag 2020.01, but the problem is present also there. Probably our best hope is the new Qt 5.14 .

[traversaro]

The behaviour is the same even with the latest qt 5.14 installed from vcpkg. The only two GUIs in YARP affected by this are (as per @drdanz intuition) yarpview and yarpscope.

[traversaro]

I debugged a bit this issue, and it was a bit complex due to the fact that yarpview and yarpscope do not return any kind of error message related to the error that they encounter. However, the problem was in the loading of the qml file in https://github.com/robotology/yarp/blob/4785668ae205f87a62c7777f77517c3b5558402c/src/yarpview/src/main.cpp#L110 . Unfortunately, there seems not to be any way of debugging the loading process of qml files (or at least I was not able to make it work).

To check, I substituted the "qrc:/qml/QtYARPView/main.qml" with a simple hello world qml (see https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qml-tutorial1.html) and it was working fine. So I added back the original .qml line by line, and I found that the qml file was not loaded correctly if the import QtQuick.Controls 1.1 line was present (https://github.com/robotology/yarp/blob/4785668ae205f87a62c7777f77517c3b5558402c/src/yarpview/src/qml/QtYARPView/main.qml#L20 ). It turns out that in vcpkg we were not installing the qt5-quickcontrols vcpkg port, as we were just installing the qt5-quickcontrols2 port. Installing the missing port fixes the problem. So, brief recap in the following:

Fix for existing installations

For existing installation, installing the missing port of qt5-quickcontrols as:

C:/robotology/vcpkg/vcpkg.exe install --triplet x64-windows qt5-quickcontrol

solves the problem.

Fix for the future

Add qt5-quickcontrol in https://github.com/robotology/robotology-superbuild-dependencies-vcpkg .

[drdanz]

@traversaro Sorry if I didn't mention this before, but for the next time the QT_DEBUG_PLUGINS and QML_IMPORT_TRACE (not sure which one of them) usually gives you some useful information about this kind of error...

[traversaro]

@traversaro Sorry if I didn't mention this before, but for the next time the QT_DEBUG_PLUGINS and QML_IMPORT_TRACE (not sure which one of them) usually gives you some useful information about this kind of error...

Actually I enabled them (both in my enviroment and uncommenting https://github.com/robotology/yarp/blob/8bc852eb80d463df96dff71a4be9dc2f7e01bae3/src/yarpview/src/main.cpp#L89), but for some reason they were not working, probably I was doing something wrong myself or the vcpkg build of Qt has some problems with those options.