[Development] Qt 6 buildsystem support requirements

[Ray Donnelly]

As someone who works on a cross platform distribution let me tell you that
cmake is plain terrible. How much custom c++ code does it contains for just
qt? Loads, absolutely tonnes or rubbish.

On Sat, Jul 21, 2018, 1:49 PM Jean-Michaël Celerier <
jeanmichael.celerier at gmail.com> wrote:

> > 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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>
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