[Meson-devel] Meson can now compile Qt Creator

[Jussi P. <jpa...@gm...>]

Hi

After days and weeks of effort, Meson has finally reached the point where
it can compile the whole of Qt Creator. We are extremely happy to be able
to prove that Meson can be used for these kinds of large scale projects.
Here are the numbers (on a Macbook Pro retina running Ubuntu 14/04):

- project configure time: <5 seconds
- unoptimized build time: 26 minutes
- no-op build time: 0.1 seconds
- total build steps: 4281
- build directory size: 2.1 GB
- size of build definitions: 4310 lines (12000 for Qmake, 8000 for qbs)

All libraries, plugins, and binaries are compiled but there are some
deficiencies:

- only one unit test is built and can be run, adding others would be just a
question of manual labor
- plugin link definitions are probably missing things, so attempting to use
some plugins will lead to missing symbols
- the actual executable won't start because Meson puts its build artifacts
into a different place than qmake so the main executable won't find them
- only works on Linux
- can not be installed
- lots of other things are probably broken

If you wish to try it yourself, you need the following:

- Meson from trunk: https://sourceforge.net/p/meson/code/ci/master/tree/
- mesonified Qt Creator from here:
https://qt.gitorious.org/qt-creator/qt-creator-meson
- Ninja and Qt5 from your distribution's packages

To build it yourself do this:

cd into_qtcreator
mkdir buildmeson
cd buildmeson
/path/to/meson.py ..
ninja (or ninja-build on Fedora)

This should provide you with a fully built but
so-broken-it-refuses-to-start Qt Creator. :)

Enjoy,