[Development] Switch the main "Qt Build System"

Alexandru Croitor alexandru.croitor at qt.io
Tue Dec 8 17:51:52 CET 2020


Hi again,

A short update on the build system switch.

Sine my last email (half a year ago) a number of issues were raised that we had to tackle in order to consider switching Qt's main build system to CMake.

Some of those issues were tracked in the following JIRA issues
https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-86053
https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-88741
as well as some other ones.

Since then:
 - most of the important issues have been fixed
 - multiple improvements have been done to the Qt build DeveloperXperience
 - qmake CI coverage has been mirrored
 - configure's default has been changed to build Qt with CMake
 - our CI and packaging pipelines have switched to using CMake for a while now
 - the Qt 6.0.0 that shipped today was built using CMake

As such, we intend to remove support for building Qt with qmake in the 6.1 branch (aka dev)

This means:
 - we will remove the qmake CI configurations in dev branch
 - we will change configure to refuse configuring Qt with the -qmake option
 - pro2cmake will not be used anymore, and the CMakeLists.txt files become the source of truth
      which means CMakeLists.txt files will now have to be modified directly
 - configurejson2cmake will not be used anymore, and the configure.cmake files will become the source of truth (not configure.json)
      which means configure.cmake files will now have to be modified directly
 - we will not remove the qmake .pro and configure.json files for now, it will be done sometime later in the future https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-88742

We intend to do it by the end of the week, if nothing critical comes up.

Regards,
Alex.


> On 1. Jul 2020, at 13:31, Alexandru Croitor <alexandru.croitor at qt.io> wrote:
> 
> Hi everyone,
> 
> An update on the build system switch.
> 
> 
> On the 8th of June I mentioned that we wanted to make the "CMake build system" the main one and remove the .pro files.
> The tentative date was 1st of July (today).
> 
> As a result of the discussion, we identified some items that had to be tackled first.
> Not all of those have been addressed yet.
> 
> So we are postponing the switch until further notice.
> 
> Regards,
> Alexandru.



More information about the Development mailing list