[Development] Build system for Qt 6

[Lars Knoll]

> On 30 Oct 2018, at 22:57, Christian Gagneraud <chgans at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Lars,
> 
> On Tue, 30 Oct 2018 at 23:42, Lars Knoll <lars.knoll at qt.io> wrote:
>>> On 30 Oct 2018, at 05:00, Christian Gagneraud <chgans at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Tue, 30 Oct 2018 at 01:17, Lars Knoll <lars.knoll at qt.io> wrote:
>>> Then why spend energy/money to fix something that is broken by design?
>>> (Again, that is a personal opinion, if needed to say)
>> 
>> As I said in my email, I unfortunately don’t see a way how The Qt Company can push Qbs forward. It was a difficult decision because I very much like the ideas and the technology used in Qbs.
>> 
>> From the perspective of a company, we have to justify investments we do, and they have to make sense not only from a perspective of being cool technology, but also how they can in the end generate business for us. In addition, there’s always the question, what we then can’t do (because the total money we can invest in R&D is limited).
>> 
>> Looking at the fact, that we can’t earn money on a build system and that it would require quite a lot of funding to make it more than a niche product it doesn’t make sense to pursue it further. Instead we would rather use the money to improve Qt and Qt Creator.
> 
> This doesn't add up, why did you develop and still develop and
> maintain 'coin' then?

Of course things don’t add up if you try to compare apples to oranges ;-)

One can’t simply compare one project to another that way.

Before we started coin, we tried to find something that fits our needs for CI. Unfortunately, we couldn’t. So we started the work on coin because we needed a better CI infrastructure than we had. Revenue is in a way the wrong term here, as having a decent CI is crucial to being able to develop and ship Qt.

> You're not making money with it. It's costing you (a lot?) and is a
> critical part of your QA infra.

A working CI is critical to Qt and being able to keep up the quality. I do think that has a lot of value for Qt.

Cheers,
Lars

> 
>>> - Did Jake left the QtC due to your early decision to drop qbs? ( I
>>> personally do think that the decision was taken long time ago)
>> 
>> The decision to not continue to develop Qbs was done very recently. It doesn’t make sense to make a decision and then not take actions. Whatever the reasons Jake left, they have nothing to do with this.
> 
> I believe you.
> 
> Thanks,
> Chris