[Development] Build system for Qt 6

[Thiago Macieira]

On Tuesday, 30 October 2018 14:44:43 PDT Christian Gagneraud wrote:
> On Wed, 31 Oct 2018 at 10:27, Thiago Macieira <thiago.macieira at intel.com> 
wrote:
> > On Tuesday, 30 October 2018 13:56:45 PDT NIkolai Marchenko wrote:
> > The only thing I'm criticising is that its proper chance involves Qt being
> > the guinea pig. Find someone else instead and grow your community. Get
> > track record for building, cross-compiling, working with weird set ups,
> > containerised build environments, build farms, etc. Don't ask Qt to switch
> > to it until you've done that work.
> 
> !?!
> What make you think qbs cannot be used in such environments?That all

I didn't say it can't. I'm saying I want proof that it can, by having other 
projects adopt the solution and there being track record of it.

> very basic stuff to me.
> - cross-compiling: Qbs support *out of the box* all "standard" OS
> *and* "standard" toolchains.
> - working with weird set ups: what does that even mean? That a very
> vague statement.

See the July email for more details.

> - containerised build: any build system can run in a container, that's
> orthogonal.

Until you run into trouble. Example of what I literally had a problem with in 
the last 30 minutes: Maven.

[ERROR] Failed to execute goal on project hadoop-auth: Could not resolve 
dependencies for project org.apache.hadoop:hadoop-auth:jar:2.8.5: Failed to 
collect dependencies at com.nimbusds:nimbus-jose-jwt:jar:4.41.1: Failed to 
read artifact descriptor for com.nimbusds:nimbus-jose-jwt:jar:4.41.1: Could 
not transfer artifact com.nimbusds:nimbus-jose-jwt:pom:4.41.1 from/to 
apache.snapshots.https (https://repository.apache.org/content/repositories/
snapshots): repository.apache.org: No address associated with hostname -> 
[Help 1]

Who do I turn to for help? A quick set of Google queries did not result in an 
answer on how to properly populate the dependencies for this thing (Apache 
Hadoop) .

> - build farms: Against what is the problem with build farm, i don't get it.

There's no problem until there's a problem. Can you point me to something that 
uses qbs to build getting built in a Linux distribution's build farm? I'd like 
to know that it's been properly tested.

It's small things like libraries ending up in /usr/lib64 instead of /usr/lib. 
Some build systems do that automatically for you; with some others you can get 
it wrong. And here's the buildsystem that failed to install libraries in the 
right place this morning: CMake.

> - etc: again, can you elaborate? that's very vague.

I did, three months ago.

> I've used Qbs to build a Desktop SW for Windows + MacOS + Linux, all
> producing platform specific installers.
> It was a breeze.
> I've used it to build a 1.5 million SLOC SW, with complex build
> matrix. 

Great. That's good track record. Now get 3 Linux distributions to package it.

> The only reason we dropped it, was because of lack of
> integration:
> QtCreator is the only IDE that knows Qbs, as i reported on Qbs mailing
> long time ago, Qbs won't take off without XCode, Visual Stidio, Visual
> Code, Eclipse, ... integration.
> And, so far, we failed at switching to CMake, the build matrix is too
> complex.

I didn't call for IDE support in my email. Tobias, in a reply to it, did.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center