[Development] Qt 6 buildsystem support requirements

[Jean-Michaël Celerier]

> There is a build system that fulfills all of Thiago's points, and it is
already widely used in the Qt community: CMake.

+1, I was flabbergasted when the big objection against CMake in Qt 6 boiled
down to "it does not supports all the architectures that Qt supports", so
instead of contributing them - or hell, even forking CMake for those
specific architectures (what are them ? I use cmake for windows, mac,
linux, android, ios and the toolchain file allows for a lot of
customization), what, create a new build system from scratch that splits
the C++ community further ? There would be so much to gain with a better
relationship between Qt and CMake.

Best,
-------
Jean-Michaël Celerier
http://www.jcelerier.name

On Sat, Jul 21, 2018 at 2:42 PM, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at>
wrote:

> Bogdan Vatra via Development wrote:
> > Anyway IMHO is more important to have a clean, nice and easy to use
> syntax
> > and to be tooling friendly than 1.b.
>
> A custom build system is always a major pain point for distributions. A
> circular dependency (what Thiago's 1.b forbids) makes it particularly
> painful. How should we bootstrap new architectures or entirely new
> distributions if we cannot build Qt due to the circular dependency between
> Qt and its build tool? This is a showstopper.
>
> > GN[1] is another example of build system which didn't care too much about
> > 1.a,b,c and it still used in quite big projects (e.g. chrome, fuchsia).
> To
> > my huge surprise, they managed to move it into a separate repo and remove
> > all chromium dependencies (yep, a few months ago you had to checkout the
> > entire chromium repo to build it :) ).
>
> GN (and its predecessor Gyp) is universally hated by distribution
> packagers
> for its non-standardness, weirdness, lack of documentation (including
> third-
> party documentation such as tutorials, an issue inherent to custom build
> systems) and lack of flexibility (custom build systems are never as
> powerful
> as widely-used general-purpose build systems).
>
> QtWebEngine is a particular pain to package because it uses TWO custom
> build
> systems (QMake and GN).
>
> The Chromium mess is also what prompted Spot to write the list of FAILs
> [https://spot.livejournal.com/308370.html] I have already linked to
> elsewhere in this thread.
>
>
> There is a build system that fulfills all of Thiago's points, and it is
> already widely used in the Qt community: CMake.
>
>         Kevin Kofler
>
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