> 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.
Qbs has made the development of multi-platform applications with multiple libraries a breeze for me. Even projects that contain firmware for different target architectures in addition to a Qt application are no problem at all with Qbs. Thanks to Qbs, I can focus on code and not on the build system. I achieve more in less time. I always thought that Qbs was a great example for using QML. > 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. It seems that Qbs never got much traction within the Qt Company either. Outside the regular blog posts, I don't see any attempt to promote Qbs anywhere. Correct me if I'm wrong. I may have noticed that Jake Petroules did his best to get the word out, but I guess that was his private mission rather than his official role in the Qt Company. What I can't complain about is the unprecedented dedication and professionalism of Christian, Jörg and Jake on this project. Also all support questions were answered in lightning speed. > 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 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). How can we leverage from the next half year to smoothly turn Qbs into a community-owned OS project? Does anybody know a positive role-model for this? I don't want to miss out on the productivity gains I've made with Qbs, but on the other hand I have very little free time. However, I would voluntarily contribute to the documentation of Qbs. Richard _______________________________________________ Development mailing list Development@qt-project.org http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/development