[Development] Build system for Qt 6

[Thiago Macieira]

On Tuesday, 18 December 2018 10:38:09 PST Matthew Woehlke wrote:
> > I work in the Anaconda Distribution as a software packager and spend
> > a significant amount of my working day battling cmake. As I say it's
> > "ok" for developers but not for packagers.
> 
> AFAIK, that experience is inconsistent with e.g. Fedora packaging where
> things usually Just Work. This makes me wonder if you're trying to do
> something that is contrary to how CMake is intended to be used or how
> packages are intended to be built/packaged/installed?

It doesn't surprise me. There are a ton of bad CMakeLists.txt out there and 
other departments at my company are known to make several of them. Plus, given 
it's popularity, you're expected to see it as a bigger proportion of packages 
to be packaged (selection bias). Autoconf may be more popular, but given its 
complexity I expect it's not used for many new projects, which means the 
problems have been long since fixed in most software that still uses it. So 
yes, having to spend time battling CMake is not surprising.

But I also don't think that's the whole story. Working in software packaging 
involves battling all buildsystems whenever the project has poorly-written 
sources. The difference is whether you can find help out there. Fighting with 
CMake or Meson or Autoconf usually means applying the same fixes over and 
over; fighting with Gyp or Bazel means tearing your hair out; fighting hand-
written Makefiles means a custom solution for every one of them.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center