In Qt 6, every module provides an associated JSON file carrying some meta data about itself.

With some additional content, these could be the authoritative source of information for third-party build tools, which at the moment need to painstakingly parse qmake or CMake files not  actually intended for consumption by other tools.

The following is a list of data currently retrieved by qbs when building Qt projects. All of these would need to be present in the JSON files in some form or other. I have left off things that are already there, like the version number.

• From qconfig.pri:
  • QT_NAMESPACE  (already present)
  • CONFIG
  • QT_CONFIG
  • QT.global.enabled_features
  • QT.global.disabled_features
  • QMAKE_MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET
  • QMAKE_IOS_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET
• From qmake.conf:
  • QMAKE_TVOS_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET
  • QMAKE_WATCHOS_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET
• From qconfig.h: QT_MAC_USE_COCOA (still relevant?)
• From mkspecs/modules/qt_{ext,lib,plugin}.pri:
  • QMAKE_LIBS and QMAKE_INCDIR (external modules only)
  • QT.<name>.depends
  • QT.<name>.module_config ("no_link", "staticlib", "internal_module", "lib_bundle", ...)
  • QT.<name>.includes
  • QT.<name>.libs
  • QT.<name>.DEFINES
  • QT.<name>.plugin_types
  • QT.<name>.TYPE
  • QT.<name>.EXTENDS
  • QT.<name>.CLASS_NAME
• From *.prl:
  •  QMAKE_PRL_TARGET
  • QMAKE_PRL_CONFIG
  • QMAKE_PRL_LIBS (preferably in structured form, rather as a command line; i.e. differentiate between library paths, libraries, framework paths, frameworks)