[Development] Qt Commercial 4.8.0 release delta to LGPL version

[Charley Bay]

I'm quoting Robin's email (with some of my comments), because I think it
was a great message that I don't want "lost":

On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 2:16 PM, Robin Burchell <robin+qt at viroteck.net>wrote:

> 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.
>

We're a Qt Commercial customer, and attended the Commercial Forums at Qt
Developer Days in San Francisco a few weeks ago, so this was not a surprise
to us.  The issue was explained (multiple development processes at
different organizations, current in-inefficiencies synchronizing
maintenance among the participants), and the greatest concern seemed to be
that the community-as-a-whole might be confused about how/why this
"result-came-about", when the only issue is simply that
community-management is still in the process of being launched, and we have
not yet established efficient synchronization across the different
structures.

Agree with Robin:  This is an important issue (technical backlog), and it
is A Good Thing(TM)  it was brought up through a clear message to the
community in a timely manner.

Further, having the benefit of "more-in-depth-information" shared by Digia
at Developer Days, IMHO this is merely a "process issue" (albeit a "real
one").  Digia did important work with these changes that benefit the
*whole* community, and the goal is to share them with the *whole*
community.  We (the "whole community") merely need a process that permits
this to happen as efficiently as possible, and IMHO everybody is already
"on-board" with a positive "work-together" Goal-And-Attitude to ensure we
all vector in the same direction.

In short, my opinion is simply:  This is merely a (short-term) result from
the fact that multiple processes-and-structures currently exist.  We can
improve this.  I see only positive intent-and-actions among all the
players, so this clearly seems resolvable.


> 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.
>

Very good points.


> So anyway, the summary of my thoughts on solving this would be:
> - get 4.x into Gitorious ASAP
>

+1


> - get the changes into 4.x (can probably be ongoing while the above
> isn't finished, but will be helped)
>

+1


> - 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 :)
>

+1

We are a commercial customer, and yes, we want Qt5 "sooner".  ;-))


> ...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.
>

Really good points and suggestions by Robin, +1.

--charley
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