[Qbs] Qbs vs Jenkins

[Richard Weickelt]

> I am wondering if it was possible to replace the Jenkins pipeline with only Qbs. In theory I see no reason why this should not work given the flexibility of the Qbs but is there any specific functionality out of the box that could make the typicial tasks performed by Jenkins easier? Specifically:
>  
> * Download sources from Bitbucket (Git)
> * Running the build using MSBuild .proj file
> * Publishing the build artifacts to external server
>  
> All of it can obviously be performed by using Javascript/Commands/Custom rules in Qbs but maybe some of it is already there so I would not need to reinvent the wheel. Also there is a question of bootstrapping such a build system since Jenkins server does have web-based front-end. But I guess it can even be used through it with Jenkins simply running the Qbs. Or perhaps it is a silly idea since Qbs was not meant to be used this way?

I am interested in this topic as well.

* What do you mean by "question of bootstrapping such a build system since
  Jenkins server does have web-based front-end"?
* Do you want to replace Jenkins completely with Qbs?
* In bigger projects you will most likely have dependencies on other
  projects. You don't want to reinvent package management, do you.
  Conan + Artifactory is used a lot for that purpose. Conan and Qbs are
  good friends. [1]

In general, I think that a declarative DSL somehow similar to the Qbs' QML
dialect would be very nice for describing continuous delivery pipelines.
Especially the Depends and Export item pair would provide a side-effect free
way to forward data from one job to another and would allow proper
parallelization of jobs. There could be more QML items, for instance, to
span a parameter matrix on multiple jobs. Many CI services use yaml these
days, but my personal impression is that yaml is much harder to read, to
write and to rehearse than QML.

Richard

[1] https://docs.conan.io/en/latest/reference/generators/qbs.html#qbs-generator