rules_qt: Build Qt applications in Bazel

[Xavier Bonaventura]

Hi,

I just wanted to start this thread to talk about Bazel rules for Qt. Would someone be interested on contributing? There are several rules around and would be nice if we could unify some effort.

I would separate the goals in 2, focusing on the first one first:

- Be able to compile Qt applications with Bazel given a precompiled Qt

- Be able to compile Qt applications with Bazel building Qt from source

Bests,

Xavi

[Tony Aiuto]

Qt. Now that is something I have not done in a long time.

On Tue, Dec 22, 2020 at 2:52 PM Xavier Bonaventura <xavibon...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

I just wanted to start this thread to talk about Bazel rules for Qt. Would someone be interested on contributing? There are several rules around and would be nice if we could unify some effort.

 

I would separate the goals in 2, focusing on the first one first:

- Be able to compile Qt applications with Bazel given a precompiled Qt

That would be a good first step. That would get the basics of a toolchain for moc (was that the name of their layout compiler?) and possibly auto-finding installed libraries.

 

- Be able to compile Qt applications with Bazel building Qt from source

IIRC, qmake was fairly simple. It may be reasonable to create a qmake to BUILD generator.

Good luck.

Bests,

Xavi

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[Xavier Bonaventura]

The autofinding would be a good idea, I did not consider that, I guess that I could take a look to see how the autofinding for toolchains works.

For the moment I found some rules already around, all of them being forks of https://github.com/bbreslauer/qt-bazel-example.

The one that to me looks more up to date is the one from https://github.com/justbuchanan/bazel_rules_qt. It already has some support for Linux and misses the Windows part.

I extended them to also support windows and for the tests that I have seems to work for Windows and Linux. They can be found here: https://github.com/limdor/bazel_rules_qt.

However my plan is to backport it to the repo from  justbuchanan and ideally have at some point one repo that could be taken as a reference.

For the moment they work with small projects, not sure what would happen with big and complex projects.

Missatge de Tony Aiuto <ai...@google.com> del dia dj., 24 de des. 2020 a les 5:33:

[Tony Aiuto]

The  community needs a good cookbook example of auto finding. I recently did a small case of it for rules_pkg. It just looks for a binary and crates a toolchain to use it. If I have some free tim maybe I can turn that into one.

[Xavier Bonaventura]

Is it already available the case that you did for rules_pkg? I could not find it.

I wanted to took a look the cc toolchain but it is in Java I guess and not as Starlark.

I would like to have separated the two parts, one the discovery of the tools, and the other the creation of the toolchain.

Not sure if in Qt is so needed but in C++ would be very useful. A lot of times I would like to be able to use the autodetected tools but in my own toolchain.

Missatge de Tony Aiuto <ai...@google.com> del dia dg., 27 de des. 2020 a les 22:23:

[Xavier Bonaventura]

I think that I found the starting point, I see that here is taking place the discovery of the c++ toolchain for windows

https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/blob/master/tools/cpp/windows_cc_configure.bzl

And I see that the entry point is the cc_configure from the WORKSPACE file.

Missatge de Xavier Bonaventura <xavibon...@gmail.com> del dia dt., 29 de des. 2020 a les 21:28:

[Tony Aiuto]

Whoops. my bad.  The work is in https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_pkg/pull/254  but not merged.

I was waiting on the Bazel 4.0 release and put it aside until then.

[Julian Amann]

This post is already quite old but anyways I want to mention https://github.com/Vertexwahn/rules_qt6 here ;)