[Qt5-feedback] Qt5's qmake

[Craig.Scott at csiro.au]

On 15/05/2011, at 9:00 AM, Doug Schaefer wrote:

> On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 6:33 PM, Thiago Macieira <thiago at kde.org> wrote:
>> On Saturday, 14 de May de 2011 12:18:50 Marcus D. Hanwell wrote:
>>>> Since cmake already has Qt4 support built-in, I assume it'll be pretty
>>>> straightforward to add Qt5, no? I think a lot of Qt devs would be
>>>> happy enough with that.
>>> 
>>> I don't think there is any question of that going away. Many of us at
>>> Kitware use Qt on a daily basis in large and small projects, and the
>>> CMake GUI is also Qt based. I would love to see even tighter
>>> integration with Qt, and know of several of us who will be building Qt
>>> 5 early releases, testing it with CMake and our code.
>> 
>> Oh yeah. qmake might be what Qt4 uses today. What Qt 5 will use, we'll see --
>> it might be qmake, it might be cmake, it could also be something else. We'll
>> see.
>> 
>> But that doesn't mean anything about third-party apps and libs. They can use
>> what's more comfortable for them. And it's really important to have support in
>> CMake and maybe a few other buildsystems too. It's clear that qmake doesn't
>> support all use-cases, so having options for those other cases is good.
> 
> That's a good point. Throughout this discussion I get confused about
> whether we're talking about building Qt apps or the Qt framework
> itself. For Qt apps, we can use whatever we want. The Qt devs will
> pick whatever they feel best for themselves.

While that may be true, the build system (internal) Qt devs are using will tend to be the best supported build system, and by extension, is likely to be the one that new Qt devs will start out with. This is the current situation with qmake and the various tutorials, documentation etc. that come as part of Qt. So while people are free to make their own choice, realistically there will be a significant number who will follow the choice made by the Qt devs themselves. It makes sense then to try to have that build system be suitable for a wider audience if the cost to Qt development resources is not too great.

--
Dr Craig Scott
Computational Software Engineering Team Leader, CSIRO (CMIS)
Melbourne, Australia