[Development] Qt Commercial 4.8.0 release delta to LGPL version

[Robin Burchell]

Hi Tuukka,

(now that I've left some hours to digest this...)

2011/12/15 Turunen Tuukka <Tuukka.Turunen at digia.com>:
> So now there is total of 108 improvements and bug fixes available in Qt
> Commercial 4.8.0 that are not part of the LGPL release. I want to underline
> that this is not the intended way of differentiating our offering. Going
> forward I hope that we can be more aligned. I would like to see most of the
> current delta integrated to Qt by the time of 4.8.1, if it is possible.

First: let me say thanks for bringing this up sooner rather than
later. That is certainly quiet a backlog (in a bad way), and one that
should be addressed ASAP, if not yesterday :). It's also pleasing to
hear that you want to work to bring these changes back to the Qt
Project.

In my opinion, there's two issues that need addressing here.

The first (already brought up) is gerrit. Gitorious' merge requests
are painful for everyone involved, so they're just going to slow you
down. Once things get into Gerrit, assuming they work in a similar
fashion to Qt 5, I think you'll find that changes can get pushed
forward a fair bit easier (especially assuming you know the right
people to poke for reviews, which I expect you do for the most part).

The second is that these changes have been going to Qt 4.8. Some
people seem to have assumed this was an issue, but I'm not entirely
sure this was correct, as I seem to recall that Ossi had a magical
script to somehow mangle changes from 4.x into Qt 5.x[1] - and if that
is the case, there really isn't much further problem I think. If this
script doesn't do what I'm hoping, then we're going to have to figure
out how to get this work into Qt 5 with the minimum of pain (meaning
as soon as possible), before merging becomes impossible or at least
impractical.

So anyway, the summary of my thoughts on solving this would be:
- get 4.x into Gitorious ASAP
- get the changes into 4.x (can probably be ongoing while the above
isn't finished, but will be helped)
- cherry-pick them into Qt 5 (in any way possible) to make sure work
isn't lost or duplicated, since I assume that your customers will be
asking about Qt 5 sooner rather than later :)

...and we're back to working as one big, happy family in Gerrit :)

[1]: http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2011-November/000483.html
- though this repo has apparently been merged into qtrepotools.