Recently se released version 1.21 of the Qbs creation tool This being the eighth release since Qt Company left the development project, prepared by the community, interested in the continued development of Qbs.
For those who are unaware of Qbs, they should know what it is a free and open source cross-platform software to manage the software creation process. The scripting language used in Qbs is tailored to automate the generation and parsing of build scripts by IDEs.
Also, Qbs does not generate makefiles, and without intermediaries such as the make utility, controls the launch of compilers and linkers, optimizing the build process based on a detailed graph of all dependencies. The presence of initial data about the structure and dependencies in the project allows you to effectively parallelize the execution of operations in several threads.
For large projects consisting of a large number of files and subdirectories, the performance of rebuilds using Qbs can outperform make several times over: the rebuild is almost instantaneous and doesn't waste the developer's time waiting.
Main news of Qbs 1.21
In this new version module provider mechanism has been redesigned (module generators). For frameworks like Qt and Boost, it is now possible to use more than one provider, determine which provider to run with the new qbsModuleProviders property, and specify a priority for selecting modules generated by different providers.
For example, two providers "Qt" and "qbspkgconfig" can be specified, the first of which will try to use a custom Qt installation (via qmake lookup), and if no such installation is found, the second provider will try to use the system-provided Qt (via a call to pkg -config).}
Another change that stands out in this new version is that added "qbspkgconfig" provider to replace "alternative" module provider that you tried to build a module with pkg-config if the module was not built by other vendors. Unlike "fallback", "qbspkgconfig" uses the built-in C++ library to directly read ".pc" files instead of calling pkg-config, which allows you to speed up your work and get additional information about the dependencies of the packages it contains. it is not available when calling the pkg-config utility.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- Fixed issues with source file change tracking on the FreeBSD platform due to millisecond discarding when evaluating file modification times.
- For the Android platform, the Android.ndk.buildId property has been added to allow overriding the default value for the “–build-id” linker flag.
- Added support for the C++23 specification, which defines the future C++ standard.
Added support for the Elbrus E2K architecture for the GCC toolkit. - The capnproto and protobuf modules implement the ability to use the runtime provided by the qbspkgconfig provider.
- Added the ConanfileProbe.verbose property to make it easier to debug projects that use the Conan package manager.
Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can consult the details in the following link.
How to install Qbs in Ubuntu and derivatives?
To build Qbs, Qt is required as a dependency, although Qbs itself is designed to organize the assembly of any project. Qbs uses a simplified version of the QML language to define project build scripts, which allows you to define fairly flexible build rules in which external modules can be plugged in, JavaScript functions can be used, and build rules can be created. arbitrary.
For those who are interested in being able to install this application on their system, They can do so by following the instructions we share below.
By default in Ubuntu and most of its derivatives we can find the application within the system repositories, but the version that we will find is an old version (1.13).
For those who want to install this version or wait until the new one is placed in the repositories, just type the following command:
sudo apt install qbs -y
In the case of those who already want to try the new version, We must obtain the package by typing the following command in the terminal:
wget https://download.qt.io/official_releases/qbs/1.21.0/qbs-src-1.21.0.zip unzip qbs-src-1.21.0.zip cd qbs-src-1.21.0 pip install beautifulsoup4 lxml qmake -r qbs.pro && make make install