Qbs 1.17.0 released

We are elated to announce version 1.17.0 of the Qbs build tool.

Qbs is a build automation tool designed for flexibility, speed and multi-platform development. It is particularly appreciated for its clean concept, easy-to-learn language and speed. Qbs has been formerly developed by The Qt Company, but since 2019 it is mostly driven by a community of volunteers.

What's new

About 272 contributions went into this release since version 1.16.0. We have selected a few highlights below. Have a look into the complete changelog if you are interested in more details.

General and Language

A new module capnp for Cap'n Proto in C++ applications has been added. Cap'n Proto is a serialization protocol similar to protobuf.

The product and project variables are now available on the right-hand-side of moduleProvider property assignments, and the default scope is the product (QBS-1587).

C/C++ Support

Lots of improvements have been made on toolchain support for bare-metal devices in general. Bare-metal targets can be selected by setting qbs.targetPlatform to 'none'. The following bare-metal toolchains are newly supported (have a look at the reference documentation for a list of known architectures):

• KEIL: ARMCLANG, C166, C251
• IAR: CR16, AVR32, M68K
• GCC: CR16, M68K, M32C, M32R, Super-H, V850, RISC-V, Xtensa

Support for Xcode 12.0 on macOS has been added and it is now possible to build universal x86_64/arm64 binaries.

Qt Support

The Qt for Android modules have been cleaned up. 

Initial support for Qt6 has been added.

Android Support

A packageType property has been added to the Android.sdk module which allows to create Android App bundles (aab) instead of apk packages only.

An aaptName property has been added to the Android.sdk module which allows to use aapt2 (QBS-1562), since aapt has been deprecated.

Support for the ARMv5, MIPS and MIPS64 targets has been removed (QBS-1496).

Try it

Qbs is available for download on the download page.

Please report issues in our bug tracker.

Join our Discord server for live discussions. We are not using IRC anymore.

You can use our mailing list for questions and discussions.

The documentation and wiki are also good places to get started.

Qbs is also available from a number of package repositories (Chocolatey, MacPorts , Homebrew ) and is 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. Please find a complete overview on
repology.org.

Qbs 1.17.0 is also included in the recently-released Qt Creator 4.13.0.

Contribute

If you are a happy user of Qbs, please tell others about it. But maybe you would like to contribute something. Everything that makes Qbs better is highly appreciated. Contributions may consist of reporting bugs or fixing them right away. But also new features are very welcome. Your patches will be automatically sanity-checked, built and verified on Linux, macOS and Windows by our CI bot. Get started with instructions in the Qbs Wiki.

Thanks to everybody who made the 1.17.0 release happen:

• Alberto Mardegan
• Christian Gagneraud
• Christian Kandeler
• Christian Stenger
• Denis Shienkov
• Ivan Komissarov
• Jake Petroules
• Jochen Ulrich
• Mitch Curtis
• Oliver Wolff
• Raphaël Cotty
• Richard Weickelt
• Sergey Zhuravlev

We are especially proud to announce that Ivan Komissarov became an approver in the Qt project due to his valuable contributions to Qbs.