Foreword: target in context of platforms/output, not project management Hi,
With recent discussions about the (non)availability of certain platform- related qmake scopes/defines, I have this weird feeling of unclarity I would like to have resolved. I understand that for Qt, as an application framework, the goal is to produce a set of executables/libraries that leverage the Qt modules. The focus here is obviously on whether you want to make a GNU/Linux binary, a Win32 binary, etc. However, the QtSDK (to my mind) has a slightly different focus, with the output (in case of mobile platforms - for now) being *distribution*, *firmware*, or, implicitly even *device* specific packages. This latter goal is a lot newer and (in my impression) not entirely embraced. To expand on this - it has been said (or IRC, lists, etc) that the Maemo scope and defines are a hack and wrong because Maemo is not an OS but a specific case of the Linux target. That is philosophically true, but the point is that Linux distributions DO have specific code, it's just currently they completely bypass Qt/qmake for this and rather opt for the more universal upstream source tarball + diff approach. Is this where Qt is headed, too ? In my case, some of my Qt projects have reached a larger number of targets and special cases/optimizations (7+, with no sign of decreasing). Considering the huge amount of hacks that I need to do to produce packages ready for distribution without manual interentions in the build process (specifying 'magic' qmake flags in particular targets). I'm actually tempted to keep a low number of main branches (say, just mobile/desktop) and treat the rest through diffs and ditch the whole qmake scoping and Q_OS ifdeffing (the only thing that is holding me back is the lack of a Qt plugin that would highlight and auto- apply the diffs when switching targets and level of the built-in git support). Thoughts, comments, disagreements welcome. PS. Disclaimer: I fully intend on making a blog post about this and the feedback I gather here :) Best regards, Attila _______________________________________________ Qt5-feedback mailing list [email protected] http://lists.qt.nokia.com/mailman/listinfo/qt5-feedback
