[Development] Future of QBS

[Jake Petroules]

> On Oct 15, 2017, at 7:23 PM, Ben Lau <xbenlau at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> On 14 October 2017 at 00:55, Denis Shienkov <denis.shienkov at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all, my 5-cents: 
> 
> QBS is better (best best) than CMake, IMHO, as CMake is too complicated.  :)
> 
> 
> I am still new to QBS, but I think it is better than CMake too. However, I think it has missed a critical feature - A simple way to run custom script. 
> 
> For example, run a script to call external command (not a product by your application) to deploy your application to App Store or simply upload to a server. 
> 
> Currently it is quite difficult to do it via qbs, so it will still need a platform depended script system. 

This is already possible - just create a rule to do this, and put it in its own product (with builtByDefault:false). Then you can simply invoke your process via `qbs run -p my_script`.

Perhaps this could be rationalized into a dedicated feature (there is something about "action targets" on JIRA) but it's not that hard to get something pretty close with today's qbs.


> Just my 2 cents
>  
> QBS needs still in BinaryFiles support (e.g. to allow todo patching, merge for some output 
> files using custom algorithms), better QtC integration (e.g. with Android && iOS). 
> 
> In other things QBS is very flexible, e.g. I have used it for creation of some application's
> Installers (for Windows), packing to archives, adding of additional rules for creating of HEX, 
> MAP and so forth 'post build' things, and more more others (include compiling a projects 
> for bare-metal architectures, e.g. AVR and so on). I don't know is it possible to do it with 
> CMake with same as it simple in QBS (because CMake it is hell, IMHO).
> 
> Besides, AFAIK, Qt has the wip/qbs branch, where it builds with QBS instead of qmake.
> 
> BR,
> Denis
> 
> 2017-10-13 18:30 GMT+03:00 Oswald Buddenhagen <oswald.buddenhagen at qt.io>:
> On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 04:19:51PM +0100, Sergio Martins wrote:
> > On 2017-10-13 16:12, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> > > On Friday, 13 October 2017 07:56:47 PDT Sergio Martins wrote:
> > >> IMHO the qt-project is not in a position to reject Qt building with
> > >> qbs, simply because there's no other implementation, nobody is
> > >> going to port Qt to CMake (if you disagree start a new thread).
> > >
> > > There are volunteers to do that. They just need to know when they
> > > could start doing the work to make a proof of concept.
> >
> > Good to know Thiago. I'd say they should ask on the mailing lists
> > instead of waiting.
> >
> it already has been. we (the current maintianers of the qt build system,
> and really anyone with a grain of taste) are strongly biased against a
> cmake-based solution. in fact, we have rejected a cmake-based port of qt
> creator some years ago.
> 
> ps: there is a qbs-specific mailing list (this is specifically not
> applicable to the above topic, but that's just a tangent to start with).
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-- 
Jake Petroules - jake.petroules at qt.io
The Qt Company - Silicon Valley
Qbs build tool evangelist - qbs.io