[Development] Towards a Qt 5 beta

[lars.knoll at nokia.com]

Hi everybody,

hope many of you had the chance to take some time off over easter. I
certainly did.

Now that the alpha is out, there's work we need to do to get things in
shape for a beta.

We are now done with new feature development and changes to our API. I
will merge the api_changes branch that contains the remaining changes to
our api back to master by the end of this week, and close the branch after
that.

We should from now on not break source compatibility anymore unless
there's a really good reason. Any non source compatible change should be
discussed here and reviewed by me. We can still break binary
compatibility, but I'd like to ask everybody to only stage these changes
on Fridays and Saturdays, so that we can work with less disruption during
the rest of the week.

Focus from now on until we have 5.0 in our hands needs to be on getting
the remaining bugs fixed, and polishing the product. There's lots of work
to be done:

** Finish modularizing our documentation and polish it **

Our documentation is still in a rather bad state, and requires lots of
care and attention from everybody.

Our current docs are in a rather bad state, hard to build and not modular.
Some initial work has started to modularize the docs, but more is needed.


To help with this I would like to nominate Casper Vandonderen as the
maintainer for our documentation. I've already talked to him and he's
interested and willing to take the job. This doesn't mean he is
responsible for writing or reviewing all the documentation we have, but
his role would be to set the direction and quality standards that we
should strive for.

Casper will also send out an email with more details on what needs to
happen in this area.

** open tasks **

There are a number of critical bugs that require fixing before the beta,
see 
https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-25005 and
https://bugreports.qt-project.org/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?mode=hide&requ
estId=12996.

** insignificant tests **

We still have quite some tests (around 110 in total) marked as
insignificant. This means they will be ignored by the CI system. Any help
to reduce this number would be great.

** test packages **

The folks over at Digia are currently working on giving us binary packages
and I hope we'll have something up and running soon that creates packages
on a regular basis. Please download and test them if you have some time.

** Other items **

Other than that, it's important that we are now careful with the changes
we do, and focus on stabilization. Work on performance improvements and
memory consumption is still ok as long as we don't go into huge
refactorings that aren't decently covered by automated tests.

You've probably also seen Jason's mail from last week. If not, please go
back and read it once again. Jason has been leading Qt (and Qtopia)
releases a couple of times in the past within both Trolltech and Nokia. He
will be helping us to get the release out with a focus esp. on quality.

So he might come to many of you with things that need to get fixed, or
block more adventurous changes from going into 5.0. Please help him with
his task.

Cheers,
Lars