[Interest] Interest Digest, Vol 19, Issue 82

[Danny Price]

On 19 Apr 2013, at 20:49, André Pönitz <andre.poenitz at mathematik.tu-chemnitz.de> wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 03:36:21PM +0100, Danny Price wrote:
>> 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:
>> 
>> [...]
>> - QtCreator's .pro file templates are embarrassingly bad and misleading. Don't
>> use them.
> 
> I am sure you can support this claim by giving links to some more
> detailed descriptions on bugreports.qt-project.org.
> 
> Andre'

I've contributed a number of bug reports and patches to bugreports.qt-project.org, several of which are still marked as P2 or P1 (take a look at 30657, 30279 or 30284 for example).

But this falls more under the category of a feature request:

- No subdir templates or wizards which means no way to create hierarchical projects within Creator. You have to use a separate text editor to create the pro files manually and then import them. QMake is fully capable of complex hierarchical projects including Creator itself and this should be promoted.

- No templates or example projects for common things like an executable linking to a dependant library. This requires a surprising amount of work with QMake, more so to make it work correctly.

- No binary or configuration directories - on Linux and Mac, all generated files, objects and binaries are dumped into one messy project directory (don't get me started on shadow builds - that wasn't a solution).

At the very least, Creator should be able to generate a project that the user can expand without having to read through documentation, like XCode and VisualStudio. I know that Qt lacks a document framework but you get far more out of the box with an MFC (!), .Net or Cocoa Document-based project than you do with Creator's Qt Gui App. 

In regard to my bad or wrong comment, there is a lot of confusion regarding directory variables (PWD, IN_PWD etc) and dependencies. This leads to the impression that QMake (and by extension, Qt and Creator) is poor which isn't true. Some more comprehensive out of the box example projects would go a long way to address this.