Agreed, a brilliant bit of technology, such a shame to see it deprecated.
On Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 4:24 PM Corentin <corentin.ja...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Having had the pleasure to use QBS quite extensively (and successfully) in
> the past, I would like to thank the QBS team and contributors for showing us
> what a sane, modern build system could look like.
> So long!
>
> On Mon, 29 Oct 2018 at 13:17 Lars Knoll <lars.kn...@qt.io> wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> As you will probably remember, there have been lively discussions around
>> what kind of build tool to use for Qt 6 both during Qt Contributor Summits
>> as well as on this mailing list.
>>
>> There has been a strong consent that we should move away from qmake as our
>> build tool for Qt due to many shortcomings and the burden we have
>> maintaining the system.
>>
>> Thiago wrote a set of relatively strict requirements for such a build tool
>> in his mail in July. While some of the requirements had a bit of a Linux
>> specific background, they have been a good basis.
>>
>> There have been rather lively discussions around alternatives, but most
>> focused around two possible choices for us: Qbs and cmake.
>>
>> Qbs is something that has been developed almost exclusively by The Qt
>> Company. As such, TQtC had to also look at it from a business perspective
>> and how it fits into the larger picture of making Qt successful. To make a
>> long story short, while Qbs is pretty cool and interesting technology, it
>> doesn’t really help us expand the Qt ecosystem and usage.
>>
>> To make Qbs really successful would require a rather large effort and
>> investment in promoting it towards the larger C++ ecosystem as a new build
>> tool. At the same time it has to be an open source product to stand any
>> chance in the market. Together this makes it challenging for TQtC to see how
>> to recover that investment. Thus this investment would be at the expense of
>> other things we’d like to do, like improving our IDE, working on
>> rearchitecting and cleaning up our core frameworks for Qt 6 or the design
>> tooling we are currently investing into. The Qt Company believes that those
>> other investments are more important for the future of Qt than our choice of
>> build tool.
>>
>> As such, we were left with the question on whether we need Qbs as the build
>> system for Qt 6 or whether cmake (as the other alternative) would be up to
>> the task.
>>
>> Given that background, we’ve done some more research on using both Qbs and
>> cmake to build Qt. Both projects did give us good results but we were
>> actually surprised on how far we got with cmake in a rather limited period
>> of time.
>>
>> In addition, cmake has the advantage of being very widely used in the C++
>> ecosystem (amongst many others by KDE), has a very wide support in many IDEs
>> and other tools (e.g. VCPkg, Conan etc.), and there’s a lot of knowledge
>> about the build system available in the ecosystem. Using it with Qt 6 would
>> also mean that we can focus our support on two build systems for our users
>> (qmake and cmake) and we would not have to add a third one to the mix.
>>
>> Given that we are confident we can build Qt 6 with cmake, I believe that it
>> makes most sense to follow down that route. In case you’re interested, you
>> can have a look at the cmake prototype code for qtbase on Gerrit in the
>> wip/cmake branch. Please also let us know if you’re interested in helping
>> with the effort of porting Qt’s build system over to cmake.
>>
>> 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).
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Lars
>> _______________________________________________
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>> Development@qt-project.org
>> http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/development
>
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