Pyqtdeploy plan for the end of qmake?

[Patrick Stinson]

I have an app which has both python code and a sip-based Python extension to allow to app’s python code to access C apis. The sip extension contains classes that extend Qt classes via the .sip files provided by PyQt.

At current anyone who is developing such a sip extension has to build the entire Qt/Python/sip/PyQt stack from source. This has always been and still is horribly cumbersome when developing on more than one platform. For all the time I put into this project, I spend most of my time trying to keep my development environment alive across platforms because of the fragility of configuring and building the stack. It is such a pain that I will venture to predict that almost no one is doing this seriously on both macOS and windows, if on windows at all. If I am right, then that is a shame.

Broadly speaking, I believe this problem is important enough to point it out. I Am hijacking this email thread on the future of qt and dropping qmake in favor of cmake to point out this problem and ask for your thoughts.

-Patrick

> On Jul 7, 2020, at 1:26 PM, Phil Thompson <phil at riverbankcomputing.com> wrote:
> 
> On 07/07/2020 20:12, Patrick Stinson wrote:
>> I am not familiar with cmake yet, but do you think that ditching qmake
>> will make it possible to compile and link sip extensions against the
>> pip-installed pyqt5 on various platforms? I have an app that has a
>> custom sip extension.
> 
> I don't really understand the question. You don't link against extensions. An extension isn't necessarily a library.
> 
> Phil