Is there any advantage in using Qmake?

[Andreas Pakulat]

On 03.03.08 10:09:30, Andreas Pakulat wrote:
> On 03.03.08 12:56:11, Phil wrote:
> > Thank you for reading this.
> > 
> > I've always used one of the KDE templates as a stating point to develop my
> > applications. Now that I've had taste of QT4, under Qmake, I'd like to convert
> > my old code to use QT4.
> > 
> > I had intended to wait until a KDE 4 template became available
> 
> Its already there (in 3.5.1).
> 
> > but there may not
> > be any reason to wait. Is there any advantage in building Qmake applications
> > over that of KDE template applications that use make? As far as I can see, there
> > is no difference in the end result. I think that I would have to use Qmake if I
> > were developing applications to run under Microsoft Windows and that's unlikely.
> 
> For small pet projects there's not a big difference between automake and
> qmake. In general automake (the kde3 templates all use that) is known to
> be harder to learn (due to its syntax and the autoconf macro language).
> QMake is often perceived as simple buildsystem, meant for mostly small
> projects, but if you know all the "undocumented" things its pretty
> powerful as well.
> 
> If you only use either of the two via KDevelop and never touch the
> actual buildsystem files I think QMake has a slight advantage because
> the UI doesn't expect from you to know anything about the syntax. While
> for automake you'll have to know what a target is, what the difference
> is between a libtool and non-libtool lib and a few other things.
> 
> The KDE4 template, btw., uses the CMake buildsystem, which has no GUI
> support in KDevelop3. So if you want to try that one, you should first
> look into man cmake and www.cmake.org.

Just thought about one other thing: The QMake support in KDevelop3 is
(AFAIK) better at keeping your existing .pro files working, whereas the
automake manager might easily screw the Makefile.am's (especially when
order of things is important).

Andreas

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Hope that the day after you die is a nice day.