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# qmake

qmake is a simple tool from Trolltech to create and maintain makefiles for software projects.

It can be a painful task to manage makefiles manually, especially if you develop for more than one platform or use more than one compiler. qmake automates and streamlines this process and lets you spend your valuable time on writing code, not makefiles.

The main motivation for developing qmake was that we spent far too much time maintaining makefiles for Qt, our cross-platform GUI toolkit. Qt supports around 15 flavors of Unix, Microsoft Windows, and around 15 different C++ compilers. We looked at GNU autoconf, but it was Unix-specific and not flexible enough in our opinion. Our makefile system also had to deal with Qt meta object compiler (moc) and user interface compiler (uic) issues. The moc program extracts meta information from C++ files and generates a C++ file with data tables etc, while the uic program generates additional .h and .cpp files when building a typical Qt application. It takes extra work to add makefile rules for the moc and the uic and we wanted to automate this task.

- qmake User's Guide
- qmake Command Reference