[Development] Qt 6 buildsystem support requirements

[Christian Gagneraud]

On 22 July 2018 at 00:42, 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.

How do you build gcc on Debian? Which compiler do you use? How do you
build the afore mentioned compiler in the first place?
Bootstrapping is a natural process in SW dev, and is and has always
been a long meander. Implementation details don't matter.
AFAIK, Debian cannot even be cross-compiled (Debian ports have never
been build this way)....

CMake has a special bootstrapping mode, QMake has one, and any other
build tools (can) have their own, this includes Qbs, and many other..

IMHO, this self-contained, circular dependency discussion is moot.
As mentioned by Thiago himself, this is a non-problem, it can be
easily solved for most build system that are on the table.

Can we stop for a moment about self/circular dependency and bootstrapping?
Let's move on more serious topics.

Chris