[Qbs] QBS usage

[Uwe Salomon]

Hello,

regarding the question of Tino Pyssyalo: we at Diehl Aerospace have switched
to Qbs in the research department for all new software projects.

Recently, we also moved a "legacy" project to Qbs which involved
project-specific build tools and multiple target architectures combined in a
single build (which we solved using make to trigger qbs multiple times; no
use of qbs multiplexing yet), as well as packaging for Debian.  Before, this
project used a non-recursive makefile-based build system, which had good
performance but grew a little difficult to maintain.

Main reasons for the switch to Qbs were:

* its good integration with Qt Creator: that the clang backend gives good
  autocompletion and warning/error "forecast" because it knows exactly how
  source files will be compiled (#defines, compiler switches etc), and the
  Qt Creator project file is identical to the build definition

* its scalability for larger projects

* its extendability: A tool (like a custom compiler) can define a Qbs module
  which can then be imported by other projects

Now that we progressively move to larger teams working with Qbs, I think the
most interesting issue will be how much every developer needs to know about
Qbs in order to participate in a project.  Using it involves quite some
learning effort, and it definitely does have its pitfalls.

Best regards,
Uwe


--
Uwe Salomon
Technical Project Manager

Diehl Aerospace
An der Sandelmuehle 13
60439 Frankfurt
Germany

Phone: +49 69 5805-1731
Email: uwe.salomon at diehl.com