It would be nice if windows shortcut can be used in qmake just like symlink on Linux

In Linux environment,  softlinks can be used to point to directories of different components 
and Qt creator follow the softlinks just as though they were regular folders.

But on Windows if windows shortcut is used this does not works.

For example, in Linux, we have something like this in a .pro file:

include ($$(MY_COMPONENTS)/My_First_Component/firstComponent.pri)
include ($$(MY_COMPONENTS)/My_Second_Component/secondComponent.pri)

For this example MY_COMPONENTS is an environment variable that points to a
folder containing a softlink for each component. My_First_Component and
My_Second_Component are softlinks pointing to a folder containing the source
and build files of particular version or baseline of that component.

If we want to flip to a different version of one of the components, we can
just redirect the softlink.

On Windows, if "My_First_Component" and"My_Second_Component" are shortcuts to the  mapped directories of those components, the paths don't get resolved.