[Development] Build system for Qt 6

[Oswald Buddenhagen]

On Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 12:17:04PM +0000, Lars Knoll wrote:
> while Qbs is pretty cool and interesting technology, it doesn’t really
> help us expand the Qt ecosystem and usage.
> 
you actually don't know that. wide adoption outside the qt ecosystem
would create mindshare for the qt project & company.

> To make Qbs really successful would require

> a rather large effort
>
[generously assuming that this part is supposed to be read separately]

> and investment in promoting it towards the larger C++ ecosystem as a
> new build tool.
>
nonsense.
all the promotion qbs would need is being used to build qt.

> Together this makes it challenging for TQtC to see how to recover that
> investment.
>
i would venture the assertion that the decision makers at tqtc just
don't give a shit.
because other companies manage to make a living off (mostly) open-source
build tools, both with consulting and with enterprise add-ons.

on top of that there are long-term savings to be made from increased
productivity (which several posters to this thread have confirmed or
implied). that alone won't offset the cost vs. using cmake (it would vs.
developing and using qmake), but it's not negligible.

On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 10:42:13AM +0000, Lars Knoll wrote:
> it would require quite a lot of funding to make it more than a niche
> product
>
nonsense.
qbs is already a very generic and powerful tool. there isn't anything
that needs to be done to make it attractive for non-qt use.
domain-specific non-qt functionality is exactly the kind of thing the
community would contribute - that's actually what the majority of
outside contributions already have been about.

> we were actually surprised on how far we got with cmake in a rather
> limited period of time. 
> 
that should read "the people who volunteered for the task were
surprised".

> the wip/cmake branch shows that this can be done without having ’to
> bend a dinosaur’.
>
uhm, really? "bending a dinosaur" is an euphemism in my view - i'd call
it an effin' disease. the anticipation of exactly *that* is why we
started qbs in the first place.

> On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 10:00:18PM +1300, Christian Gagneraud wrote:
> > - 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.
>
actually, christian is spot-on, ironically for exactly the reason you
cite yourself. the decision to go forward with qbs was repeatedly made
internally, but never followed up by actions (in form of staffing the
project adequately to make it ready for qt in a finite timeframe). jake
had joined the company *because of qbs*, yet tqtc never assigned him to
that task - except where he managed to squeeze it into consulting jobs,
he was contributing to qbs in his spare time despite working for tqtc.
it shouldn't surpise that at some point he said "fuck that" and headed
for greener pastures.