[Development] Build system for Qt 6

[Bogdan Vatra]

Yup, it's a sad day for people who liked QBS. Personally I'll check GN, which 
has a nice syntax, not as nice as QBS but ... :) .

În ziua de luni, 29 octombrie 2018, la 18:32:11 EET, Ray Donnelly a scris:
> Agreed, a brilliant bit of technology, such a shame to see it deprecated.
> 
> On Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 4:24 PM Corentin <corentin.jabot at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Having had the pleasure to use QBS quite extensively (and successfully) in
> > the past, I would like to thank the QBS team and contributors for showing
> > us what a sane, modern build system could look like. So long!
> > 
> > On Mon, 29 Oct 2018 at 13:17 Lars Knoll <lars.knoll at qt.io> wrote:
> >> Hi all,
> >> 
> >> As you will probably remember, there have been lively discussions around
> >> what kind of build tool to use for Qt 6 both during Qt Contributor
> >> Summits as well as on this mailing list.
> >> 
> >> There has been a strong consent that we should move away from qmake as
> >> our build tool for Qt due to many shortcomings and the burden we have
> >> maintaining the system.
> >> 
> >> Thiago wrote a set of relatively strict requirements for such a build
> >> tool in his mail in July. While some of the requirements had a bit of a
> >> Linux specific background, they have been a good basis.
> >> 
> >> There have been rather lively discussions around alternatives, but most
> >> focused around two possible choices for us: Qbs and cmake.
> >> 
> >> Qbs is something that has been developed almost exclusively by The Qt
> >> Company. As such, TQtC had to also look at it from a business
> >> perspective and how it fits into the larger picture of making Qt
> >> successful. To make a long story short, while Qbs is pretty cool and
> >> interesting technology, it doesn’t really help us expand the Qt
> >> ecosystem and usage.
> >> 
> >> To make Qbs really successful would require a rather large effort and
> >> investment in promoting it towards the larger C++ ecosystem as a new
> >> build tool. At the same time it has to be an open source product to
> >> stand any chance in the market. Together this makes it challenging for
> >> TQtC to see how to recover that investment. Thus this investment would
> >> be at the expense of other things we’d like to do, like improving our
> >> IDE, working on rearchitecting and cleaning up our core frameworks for
> >> Qt 6 or the design tooling we are currently investing into. The Qt
> >> Company believes that those other investments are more important for the
> >> future of Qt than our choice of build tool.
> >> 
> >> As such, we were left with the question on whether we need Qbs as the
> >> build system for Qt 6 or whether cmake (as the other alternative) would
> >> be up to the task.
> >> 
> >> Given that background, we’ve done some more research on using both Qbs
> >> and cmake to build Qt. Both projects did give us good results but we
> >> were actually surprised on how far we got with cmake in a rather limited
> >> period of time.
> >> 
> >> In addition, cmake has the advantage of being very widely used in the C++
> >> ecosystem (amongst many others by KDE), has a very wide support in many
> >> IDEs and other tools (e.g. VCPkg, Conan etc.), and there’s a lot of
> >> knowledge about the build system available in the ecosystem. Using it
> >> with Qt 6 would also mean that we can focus our support on two build
> >> systems for our users (qmake and cmake) and we would not have to add a
> >> third one to the mix.
> >> 
> >> Given that we are confident we can build Qt 6 with cmake, I believe that
> >> it makes most sense to follow down that route. In case you’re
> >> interested, you can have a look at the cmake prototype code for qtbase
> >> on Gerrit in the wip/cmake branch. Please also let us know if you’re
> >> interested in helping with the effort of porting Qt’s build system over
> >> to cmake.
> >> 
> >> We have been developing Qbs over the last years, and as such are
> >> committed to it for some more time. We are planning on another feature
> >> release in the first quarter of next year and will support it in Qt
> >> Creator for at least another year. Qbs is open source and if someone
> >> wants to take over and develop it further let us know as well. I’d also
> >> like to use this place to thank Christian and Jörg for all their great
> >> work on Qbs  (and of course also anybody else who contributed to it).
> >> 
> >> Cheers,
> >> Lars
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Development mailing list
> >> Development at qt-project.org
> >> http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/development
> > 
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