I've been using $$qtLibraryTarget() as a wrapper around library target names in my project, but I'm not sure what it does; there doesn't seem to be much documentation on it. One thing it definitely does is screw up qmake's Makefile 'clean' targets - the libraries generated with $$qtLibraryTarget() are never removed by 'make clean' or 'make distclean'. If the function call is removed and the library basename simply assigned to TARGET, 'clean' is able to get rid of the generated library, as expected.

And the function itself doesn't seem to do anything qmake doesn't already do. If I use it like

Qt Code: 
  1. TARGET = $$qtLibraryTarget(example)
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the Makefile produces (on Linux) a file named libexample.so for plugin projects, or the same plus symbolic links with version information if I'm building a plain library. However, if I simply say

Qt Code: 
  1. TARGET = example
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the Makefile produces...exactly the same thing.

In the interest of making my 'clean' targets work correctly, I'm thinking I'll yank $$qtLibraryTarget() throughout my project, which generates several libraries and plugins. But if the function actually does something useful, I'd like to hear about it before taking this step.