The Qt Company Decides To Deprecate The Qbs Build System, Will Focus On CMake & QMake

While Qt's Qbs build system was once planned as the default build system for Qt6 and shaping up to be the de facto successor to QMake, there is a change of course with The Qt Company now announcing they are deprecating this custom build system.

In recent months Qbs for Qt 6 began looking less certain and now The Qt Company has announced they are going to deprecate Qbs. From talking with their customers, they decided to focus on QMake and CMake.

Qbs will continue to be supported until the end of 2019 while the last release will come out in April. The Qt Company plans to continue supporting QMake and CMake. Long term though they intend to improve the tool-kit's CMake build system support and intend to eventually switch to CMake for building Qt itself. Additionally, CMake support in the Qt Creator integrated development editor is expected to be improved.

Details on the Qbs deprecation was posted today to qt.io.

Update: Lars Knoll has also commented on the decision that Qbs would have required "a rather large effort and investment" by The Qt Company to really make it pan out and they couldn't justify it from a business perspective. They are anticipating to have the CMake build system improvements ready for Qt6 so that it can be the default build system. There is the wip/cmake branch where they are now working on this CMake support until ready for mainline.