qbs 1.12 released

We are happy to announce version 1.12.0 of the Qbs build tool.

What's new?

Generating Interfaces for Qbs and pkg-config

When distributing software components such as libraries, you'd like to make it as simple as possible for other projects to make use of them. To this end, we have added two new modules: The Exporter.qbs module creates a Qbs module from a product, while the Exporter.pkgconfig module generates a .pc file.

For example:

DynamicLibrary {

    name: "mylib"

    version: "1.0"

    Depends { name: "cpp" }

    Depends { name: "Exporter.qbs" }

    Depends { name: "Exporter.pkgconfig" }

    files: "mylib.cpp"

    Group {

        fileTagsFilter: "dynamiclibrary"

        qbs.install: true

        qbs.installDir: "lib"

    }

    Group {

        fileTagsFilter: "Exporter.qbs.module"

        qbs.installDir: "lib/qbs/modules/mylib"

    }

    Group {

        fileTagsFilter: "Exporter.pkgconfig.pc"

        qbs.install: true

        qbs.installDir: "lib/pkgconfig"

    }

}

When building this project, a Qbs module file mylib.qbs and a pkg-config file mylib.pc will be generated. They contain the information that is necessary to build against this library using the respective tools. The mylib.qbs file might look like this (the concrete content depends on the target platform):

Module {

    Group {

        filesAreTargets: true

        fileTags: "dynamiclibrary"

        files: "../../../libmylib.so.1.0.0"

    }

}

As you can see, the library file is specified using relative paths in order to make the installation relocatable.

Now anyone who wants to make use of the mylib library in their Qbs project can simply do so by declaring a dependency on it: Depends { name: "mylib" }.

System-level Settings

Until now, Qbs settings were always per-user. However, some settings should be shared between all users, for instance global search paths. Therefore, Qbs now supports system-level settings as well. These are considered in addition to the user-level ones, which take precedence in the case of conflicts. System-level settings can be written using the new --system option of the qbs-config tool. This operation usually requires administrator rights.

Language Improvements

We have added a new property type varList for lists of objects. You could already have those by using var properties, but the new type has proper list semantics, that is, values from different modules accumulate.

The FileInfo extension has two new functions suffix and completeSuffix.

Two changes have been done to the Rule item:

• The explicitlyDependsOn property no longer matches artifacts from dependencies. Use the new explicitlyDependsOnFromDependencies property for that.
• The excludedAuxiliaryInputs property had a misleading name and was therefore renamed to excludedInputs. The old name will continue to work for now, but is deprecated.

C/C++ Support

The cLanguageVersion and cxxLanguageVersion properties are now arrays. If they contain more than one value, then the one corresponding to the highest version of the respective language standard is chosen. This allows different modules to declare different minimum requirements.

Autotest Support

The AutotestRunner item has a new property auxiliaryInputs that can help ensuring that additional resources needed for autotest execution (such as helper applications) are built before the autotests run.

The working directory of an autotest is now the directory in which the respective test executable is located or AutotestRunner.workingDirectory, if it is specified. In the future, it will also be possible to set this directory per test executable.

Various things

All command descriptions now list the product name to which the generated artifact belongs. This is particularly helpful for larger projects where several products contain files of the same name, or even use the same source file.

The vcs module no longer requires a repository to create the header file. If the project is not in a repository, then the VCS_REPO_STATE macro will evaluate to a placeholder string.

It is now possible to generate Makefiles from Qbs projects. While it is unlikely that complex Qbs projects are completely representable in the Makefile format, this feature might still be helpful for debugging purposes.

Try It!

The Open Source version is available on the download page, and you can find commercially licensed packages on the Qt Account Portal. Please post issues in our bug tracker. You can also find us on IRC in #qbs on chat.freenode.net, and on the mailing list. The documentation and wiki are also good places to get started.

Qbs is also available on a number of packaging systems (Chocolatey, MacPorts, Homebrew) and updated on each release by the Qbs development team. It can also be installed through the native package management system on a number of Linux distributions including but not limited to Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch Linux.

Qbs 1.12.0 is also included in Qt Creator 4.7.0, which was released this week as well.