[Qbs] Future of Qbs

[Richard Weickelt]

Dear all,

on the Qt developer mailing list, Lars Knoll recently announced:

> We have been developing Qbs over the last years, and as such are
> committed to it for some more time. We are planning on another feature
> release in the first quarter of next year and will support it in Qt

> Creator for at least another year. Qbs is open source and if someone
> wants to take over and develop it further let us know as well. I’d also
> like to use this place to thank Christian and Jörg for all their great
> work on Qbs  (and of course also anybody else who contributed to it).

Qbs is open source but the largest part of development has always been
shouldered by The Qt Company and the decision processes have never been open
and transparent.

It would be great if the TQtC could clarify what is planned for the next
feature release and why. I would be glad if the TQtC would spend the
remaining resources on transitioning the Qbs project into a community
ownership. I have no experience how a successful transition could look like.
Therefore I am asking for role models.

What I can think of, but I might be wrong: TQtC maintainers, please
communicate upfront what you are going to do, how and why so that others can
learn. Some questions, I think, we should clarify on the mailing list:

- Can we define milestones for a successful transition and clarify what
  TQtC is willing to invest?
- There were some companies using Qbs for their own projects [1]. Can we get
  committment from those?
- Can we keep using TQtC infrastructure, domain wtc.?
- How does the release process of Qbs work?
- Are there parts in the codebase that make maintenance difficult and
  that could be simplified? Maybe parts duplicating Qt code that should
  be rebased onto Vanilla Qt?

Thank You
Richard Weickelt


[1]
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CwXx2F1zuATYY3GGOTkFgDB9jwMPghf6az_RVOnskfk/edit#gid=0