[Development] CMake branch

[Frederik Gladhorn]

Hello,

I really like the idea Mikhail proposed. I would even go as far as to add one 
platform where we start testing building Qt with CMake in the CI once we reach 
a level where we are comfortable with it.

I think it makes sense to get the CMake port more exposed and let people play 
with it in a convenient way. In the best case, we could switch build system 
even earlier than Qt 6. For many users it's an implementation detail how Qt is 
built. The plan is to still build qmake and generate the needed pri/pro files 
so that applications can use qmake as their build system.

For everyone that does build Qt themselves, moving to a more standard way of 
doing things (CMake rather than qmake) is an advantage, most people have to 
deal with cmake anyway.

Doing simple changes to the build system are trivial in cmake and qmake (e.g. 
adding/renaming files and so on). More complex changes should be reflected in 
both. For this port to succeed, an incremental port where we can expand to 
more platforms and more modules seems most promising to me.
I'd move over to cmake and ninja for my needs instantly if I could.

Cheers,
Frederik



On torsdag 21. mars 2019 13:00:55 CET Mikhail Svetkin wrote:
> Hi everyone!
> 
> 
> We’ve had an internal discussion about wip/cmake branch.
> 
> 
> We thought maybe it is a good idea to merge wip/cmake into dev branch.
> 
> 
> The advantages are:
> 
>  - It allows our contributors to play with CMake in dev branch
> 
>  - Speed-up the build of QtBase
> 
>  - Easy to find a lot of bugs in CMake port
> 
>  - CI could have a nightly build with CMake and generate a report
> 
>  - We can synchronize CMakeFiles and *.pro files
> 
> 
> The disadvantages are:
> 
>  - Any changes should be passed by CI
> 
> 
> Do you have any objections?
> 
> Best regards,
> Mikhail