[Development] Qt Commercial 4.8.0 release delta to LGPL version

[lars.knoll at nokia.com]

On 12/16/11 6:16 AM, "ext 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.
>
>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 :)

Yes, that's the plan, except that we'll get 4.x into gerrit instead of
gitorious ;-)

Unfortunately moving it into gerrit is not as easy as one might think as
the testing infrastructure is somewhat different between Qt 4.x and Qt 5.
We could move Qt 4.x into gerrit very fast, but would loose the CI on it.
If we want to keep CI, there's some work that needs to happen first.
Sergio and Rohan know the details here.

Cheers,
Lars