[QBS] qbs for commercial applications

[Christian Kandeler]

On 08/06/2013 07:55 AM, achartier at fastmail.fm wrote:
> I have been loosely following the qbs development and it seems very
> promising as a replacement for qmake. I am, however, wondering what the
> developers' opinion is on its level of maturity.

The most important thing is to keep in mind that you would be an early 
adopter, i.e. you are likely to run into corner cases, be the first 
person to get hit by some subtle bug etc.
Regarding qbs' suitability for your particular project, I'd recommend 
that you examine whether the latter has any "interesting" requirements 
regarding the build system and try to come up with a small proof of 
concept to see whether qbs is well-equipped to handle them.

> I understand that qbs
> is still quite new, but I'm wondering what the general opinion is on the
> qbs mailinglist as to its suitability for commercial applications. Is it
> far off from being stable, are there major features missing/showstopper
> bugs, or is it fairly stable and ready for use but just lacking some
> advanced features?

If you mean "stable" in the sense of "doesn't crash all the time", I'd 
say yes, in my experience it is.
"Stable" as in "stable interfaces" -- that's a slightly more complicated 
topic. The command-line interface has been unchanged for quite some time 
now (except for additional options/commands). The project file format is 
somewhat more in flux, usually to allow more flexibility as new use 
cases come up. However, the required adaptations to existing projects 
are usually entirely mechanical. The build metadata serialization format 
also changes from time to time, resulting in the need to recompile 
projects after updating qbs.
Regarding "advanced features", here is an example of something that 
currently does not work (but is supposed to in the near future):
https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QBS-370


Christian