The Qt Company has been supporting three different build systems for Qt programs. For Qt users, qmake is currently the most widely used build system. CMake is a clear second and growing in popularity. The third place is Qbs, with significantly smaller adoption. When asked about their preferences, most of our customers said they plan to use either CMake or qmake in the future.
We have decided to deprecate Qbs and redirect our resources to increase support for CMake. Qbs will remain supported until the end of 2019 with the last planned release in April 2019, together with Qt Creator 4.9. Qbs is available under both commercial and open-source licenses, and we are happy to continue providing the infrastructure for further development by the Qt Project community.
To summarize the key points:
- Qbs will continue to be supported until end of 2019
- Last Qbs release will come out in April 2019
- Qbs continues to work with upcoming Qt Creator 4.8 and Qt Creator 4.9
- Qbs library and tools will be available under Qt Project for possible further development by the community
- Support for qmake will continue unaffected
- Support for CMake will improve
- Longer term, we plan to switch to CMake for building Qt itself
- CMake support in Qt Creator will be further improved
Deprecating Qbs allows us to significantly improve CMake support. We believe this change will help the growing number of our customers who prefer to use the CMake build system. Beneficial is also CMake’s wide adoption outside Qt and its active development ecosystem.
