[Development] Build system for Qt 6

[Olivier Goffart]

On 10/30/18 6:29 AM, resurrection at centrum.cz wrote:
> Honestly I feel very disappointed as well with this decision. I feel similarly 
> to others, Qbs is now being phased out so fast (half a year of development, 
> another half a year of maintanance after that it seems). So better get to 
> porting stuff to CMake right away. Having experience with CMake this is gonna 
> be very ugly...
> 
> What I do not understand is why the decision was qmake + cmake in the first 
> place. Why not Qbs + CMake? Was not the qmake deemed unmaintainable? It is 
> perfectly understandable to tap into wide CMake user base but why ditching Qbs 
> and not qmake? I wouldn't expect people would mourn qmake...

This is not about "qmake + cmake" vs. anything.

Qbs did not disappear from one day to the other.
What Lars said, if I read the email properly, is that the Qt Company does not 
see a business value in developing it further.
But the project is open source and the code is there and anyone is free to take 
over if they are interested in it.

It's exactly the same for qmake, which was already in just maintenance mode, 
and hasn't gotten new feature for a long time and will not get any. Just 
continue to work as is.

And Qbs does not have to build Qt for you to use it.

> Oh and on the point of CMake. Lets write a simple if statement as per docs:
> 
> set(var1 "Hello")
> set(var2 "Hello")
> if(var1 EQUAL var2)
>      message("They are equal")
> endif()
> 
> Guess what, it prints NOTHING despite docs explicitly saying this should work. 
> Nothig will help, STREQUAL, MATCHES, dereferencing the arguments, whatever. 

Well don't use C++ then.

     char var1[] = "Hello";
     char var2[] = "Hello";
     if (var1 == var2)
         puts("They are equal");

Guess what, it prints NOTHING. My point is that you should not trash the whole 
language just because of a few tricks. Every languages (including JS used by 
Qbs) has its small drawback. And there are more documentation and example of 
script using cmake out there than both qmake and qbs together.


Nobody is forcing you to use cmake if you don't like it. (Unless you want to 
contribute to Qt.) There are plenty of other build system out there that can be 
used to build your C++ application using the Qt library.

-- 
Olivier

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