[Development] Build system for Qt 6

[Oswald Buddenhagen]

On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 02:47:43PM -0400, Matthew Woehlke wrote:
> On 30/10/2018 14.30, Edward Welbourne wrote:
> > Painful as [CMake's] syntax is (I've begun reviewing the work for
> > it), it's there, someone else is supporting it, and the expected
> > time to the final demise of qmake does look shorter than our other
> > options.
> 
> FWIW, I don't think anyone is praising CMake's syntax. The problem is
> finding a *viable* (and that includes *backwards-compatible*) plan to
> do something about it.
> 
> If anyone can figure that out, I suspect CMake would be, ah, "highly
> receptive" :-).
>
as i already said to bill (@kitware) in person at the desktop summit in
2011, there is absolutely nothing they can do to make cmake sane without
it ceasing to be cmake (and thus losing its ecosystem advantage). now, 7
years later, i can't help but observe that the evidence supports my
assertion: while there have been various incremental improvemments (i'll
happily admit that a reasonably simple "leaf" project file doesn't look
outright atrocious any more), the horrors one faces beyond the basic
stuff just aren't going away.

and to be clear, it isn't *just* the syntax (though the fact that there
is literally just one syntactical top-level construct - the "function
call" with a free-form list of arguments - to express a touring-complete
language *really* doesn't help), but also the higher-level project
structure and how the language interacts with the backend.