[Interest] Interest Digest, Vol 19, Issue 82

[Danny Price]

I've used QMake in two large cross-platform projects, one of which wasn't
even a Qt application. I did look at other options including CMake and
Premake 4 but decided to stick with QMake.

Here are my thoughts:

- The documentation is poor and in some case misleading and wrong. Google
'undocumented qmake' for some fairly vital information, particularly in
regard to subdirs.

- QtCreator's .pro file templates are embarrassingly bad and misleading.
Don't use them.

- The ability to create extra targets and custom build steps which run
automatically based on dependant files is really, really powerful and a
godsend for those icky special cases. None of the other build systems I
looked had quite the level of 'hackability' that QMake provides.

- It understands Qt's MOC, RC and UI compilers natively.

- It supports all platforms Qt supports and allows the mixing of C, C++,
Objective-C and Objective-C++ (the latter is vital on Mac).

- The syntax is fairly readable compared to QMake.

- It's the native build system for QtCreator and can generate XCode and VS
projects.

The last point is really important; a build system without good IDE support
is of limited value in the real world. CMake support is improving but it's
not there yet.

I'm hoping QBS will prove a viable alternative at some point. I really
liked the Lua syntax and the JS integration makes sense. But it's still a
toy project.

Build systems are messy by their nature though. You hack them so that they
work for a project and spend your time on more important things.

Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2013 14:11:29 +0200
> From: Bo Thorsen <bthorsen at ics.com>
> Subject: Re: [Interest] qmake: questions regarding huge projects
> To: Jan Kundr?t <jkt at flaska.net>,       "interest at qt-project.org"
>         <interest at qt-project.org>
> Message-ID: <51713471.9030108 at ics.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
>
> Den 19-04-2013 13:36, Jan Kundr?t skrev:
> > On Friday, 19 April 2013 12:29:04 CEST, Rainer Wiesenfarth wrote:
> >> well, I know about cmake, but was going for something less cryptic...
> :-)
> >
> > One of my biggest disappointments with qmake was that it just did not
> set up proper dependencies between the static libs I build and the targets
> which use it. Either I was missing something obvious, or qmake is really,
> really stupid. Yes, you can add a ton of macros on top of it to make it
> sane, but is that really what you want to do? Further details at [1].
> >
>
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