news on QMake support

[Ian Reinhart Geiser]

Greetings,
Just a bit of news on the state of QMake support in KDevelop head.

I have been adding features that allow us to use some of the more advanced
and less documented features of QMake.  The most important one being
custom variables.  These custom variables allow us to make more advanced
QMake projects that can configure themselves just as easy as autotools.

Example:
   KDEINCDIR = $$system(kde-config --expandvars --type headers)
Will populate the variable KDEINCDIR with the location of the KDE headers.
 This way by using $$KDEINCDIR in your include path of the dialog you can
get the kde headers and use QMake to build KDE applications.  Sure beats
that 1mb configure script.

The second big part that I added where config options for more advanced
features for cross compiling windows builds.  These are console app and
build as dll.  These allow devs when cross compiling or building on
windows to have the correct features.

The third part is useful because it gives us the ability to make KDE
plugins and more portable shared libraries.  These are the build libtool
archive option and build package config file.  Package config allows you
to locate where resources for a library are installed, and the linking
flags to correctly link that library into your project.  It greatly
reduces the complexity of library distribution to third parties, and is
encouraged for anyone building a shared library.

The big plans that are not complete yet are the ability to choose the
mkspec that you wish to use when building the project, and devise better
support for custom build targets within the QMake project.

I hope everyone enjoys these new features and if there is any feedback let
me know.

Also editing custom variables doesn't work yet, because the UI is not
hooked up.  I need to clean up a few brain damages before i can reliably
let others use the feature.

Cheers
   -ian reinhart geiser


--
--
+-Ian Reinhart Geiser geiseri at sourcextreme.com
+-Vice President of Engineering
+-http://www.sourcextreme.com
+-It's not that we don't make mistakes, we just don't keep them around.