[Development] Build Hotspots in the Qt build process

[Poenitz Andre]

Shane McIntosh [mcintosh at cs.queensu.ca] wrote:
> Hi Qt developers!
> 
> My name is Shane. I’m a PhD student at Queen’s University in Canada.
> 
> I’ve been working on an approach for detecting build hotspots, i.e.,
> files that not only take a long time to rebuild, but also change often. 
> We think that these files are ideal candidates for refactoring that could 
> shave time off of incremental builds that are really impacting software teams.

That sounds like a good idea in general. 

Looking at your list at

 > http://sailhome.cs.queensu.ca/~shane/content/qt_hotspots.txt

I wonder a bit how e.g. xmlpatterns can be considered a "hotspot" 
that according to your definition "changes often". The actual 
code has not been changed much for a while except for occasional 
merges and the annual bumps in copyright headers.

My gut feeling is that any refactoring there is not worthwhile.

> I’m happy to provide a more detailed Qt dataset when I 
> return to my lab next week.

It would be nice to see some reason ("numbers") why files ended
up on the list.

Best regards,
Andre'