[Qbs] QBS usage

[Richard Weickelt]

Hello Tino,

> I’d like to conduct a small survey about QBS usage in the community to make
> investment and feature decisions to the product.

I was really worried when your handyman and chief evangelist jumped off the
boat towards the dark side in February. So I've got a question back: What
are the current plans of TQtC for Qbs? Any roadmap? I saw that there is
ongoing work to port Qt modules to Qbs.

> I’d like to know, if you have used or are using QBS as a build system in
> real projects and all feedback and suggestions would be mostly welcome. This
> is a great opportunity to affect the future of QBS. Obviously, we are
> closely following QBS issues in Jira and in this mailing list, so there’s no
> need to report any known issues, unless you want to emphasize something
> extremely important to you.
I have been using it in pet projects, Qt and non-Qt. Especially in the
latter case I am very glad to get away from GNU make and CMake. The
easy-to-rehearse markup language, clean concept and especially separation of
profiles and project files beats any other build system I have seen. Qbs has
also helped me a lot to structure my projects better. It's really
easy-to-use once you understood the concept and the concept feels like
coming from the textbook.

But I've had a hard time to sell Qbs at work for embedded C programming. The
major issues is that Qbs doesn't support awkward toolchains like IAR or TI
CGT. The other issue is a general scepticism about anything else than GNU
Make or GUI-based build systems in IAR, Eclipse, etc. But I don't know how
to address the latter.

I see room for improvement in the QtCreator integration. Maintaining
profiles with custom settings and inheritance is still painful. I would
rather vote for keeping profiles in QML rather than config files + GUI.
Since QML profiles are nowadays possible in projects, I wonder if that could
be applied to normal profiles as well. https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QBS-895

Now I can't wait for using Qbs for development of Qt. QMake sucks and
incrementally rebuilding a Qt Module takes forever.

Richard