At present, generation of the HTML from reStructuredText sources is driven by QMake, configured by quips.pro, which amounts to a convoluted way of generating a Makefile that could do the same thing. I could easily hand-craft such a Makefile, surely smaller and more human-readable than the 51+kB one currently generated (dominated by irrelevant dependencies on QMake's mkspec files), that would be easier to maintain than the quips.pro and remove the dependency on a build-time Qt artefact, when the system make should suffice. (The nominally greater portability of using QMake to generate the Makefile is illusory thanks to Unix-specific commands in quips.pro.)

Alternatively someone could probably write a python script to simply drive the existing python scripts, updating every file; there aren't enough QUIPs for this to be an expensive operation, so incremental building isn't really a meaningful win from make-based solutions, and this would be a more portable solution.

In particular, this should make it easier to set up a server to publish QUIPs, that automatically keeps itself up to date; removing the dependency on QMake would mean there's one fewer thing the server needs installed to make automatic updates.