[Development] Who is in charge of qt-project.org?

[Richard Weickelt]

Tuukka,

On 02.11.2018 13:44, Tuukka Turunen wrote:
> 
> Exactly. We are very pleased if there are people who start to contribute
> to Qbs. So far it has been very little by others than employees of The Qt
> Company.

Here are some possible reasons:
- the Qbs core code base is complex
- the code contains very little documentation
- the codebase evolved fast
- technical decisions and planning happened
  behind closed doors
- most users were comfortable with the development
  speed and TQtC employees fixing bugs and helping
  on the mailing list.

I'd say that TQtC employees have done an excellent (technical) development
job, really. But that alone has not lead to a healthy community of
contributors. This is not to blame TQtC, it's my personal view from outside.
I haven't contributed anything to Qbs, but I have been following the
development with high interest and I am happily using it.

> We will continue maintaining Qbs so that it stays supported until end of
> 2019 and also release a new version in April 2019 as promised. Most
> likely Qbs remains usable a long time after support ends - even without
> anyone from the community working on it.
> 
> This is a good opportunity for those interested in further developing Qbs
> to step up and start taking it forward. We can help with the reviews and
> provide the infrastructure. We can help even with new releases, if there
> is enough interest to develop it further.

Could you please post that on the Qbs mailing list, maybe even in the blog?
I believe that this is the right communication style to go forward and it is
very important that TQtC communicates proactively and clearly what it can
help with. I don't expect You to coddle the community, but please keep in
mind that there is very little community feeling until now. We are starting
almost at 0 now.

> I do not think anyone questions the technical merits of Qbs over qmake or
> CMake. Qbs is better than these in many ways. For that reason we have
> kept on investing into it. But we also need to be realistic and think
> about what paying customers prefer. While we have some customers using
> Qbs, the use of CMake is much, much bigger. Both by the number of
> customers using it and by the size of the customers' usage.
> 
> We probably should have opened the dialogue about the future of Qbs
> during the process of thinking about the options. This would have been
> good and fair towards the community. 

Absolutely, yes! That's too late now. But it's not too late to keep Qbs
alive. For example, you could start by revising your blog post and giving it
a more inviting character. Next step could be maybe a meeting with community
members where we would clarify how the commitment of the TQtC looks like. I
am sure that there are many open questions.

Thank You
Richard