[Development] Notes on "Qt Build Systems" @ QtCon 2016

[Stephen Kelly]

Thanks Andrew for these notes! You did really well to capture the key points from a complex and meandering discussion.






>- (Stephen) "In reality, rewriting Qt's build system in CMake will
>actually be a PITA, and will require changes to CMake to make everything 
>better"


I think something was lost in transit on this point. I don’t think it would be a PITA to write a CMake buildsystem for Qt. I recall the above point was in reference to ‘compiling host tools and using them in the build while cross compiling’. The way CMake makes that possible currently(!) is implemented separately to the core of CMake with the ExternalProject module. 

It can be implemented better in the core of CMake if someone wants to do so and that would be better, but it’s not very urgent and no one has volunteered to do it.

Even if CMake did better in that scenario though, that’s not the reason Qt is not going to use CMake, so it doesn’t matter anyway.

Thanks,

Steve.