[Development] Feature freeze and Alpha

[lars.knoll at nokia.com]

Hi everybody,

the weather in Europe seems to follow our schedule these days. It's
freezing cold.

We're now starting with our feature freeze for Qt 5. Let's go a bit
through what this means and what we need to do next.

We will soon have to start preparing the Alpha of Qt5. The purpose of the
Alpha release is to validate the APIs, as well as to get some first
general feedback on Qt5 as a product.

The beta will then expose this to a wider audience and the focus there is
mostly to find the remaining bugs and showstoppers, not to work on the API
anymore.

In terms of the code, it means the following:

* No new features
* We need to now quickly review all new API that got added since Qt 4.8
	* The bulk of reviews should be done within the next 2 weeks
	* All API changes have to be carefully managed to not break things for
others
	* Smaller API additions (a function) are still ok
  There's a meta bug to track this:
https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-23996
  I'll assign the subtasks to the module maintainers, please follow up on
it as soon as possible.
  This is very important, so that feedback we collect on the APIs during
the Alpha period is valid.
* Focus should from now on mainly be on bug fixing the existing
functionality, don't introduce new
  features

The feature freeze is for all the modules that are part of Qt Essentials.
Qt Add-ons can choose to follow the freeze if they want to prepare
themselves to be ready at the same time as Qt 5.0. If you are a maintainer
of an add-on that wants to follow the feature freeze, please announce this
on the mailing list separately.


There are a few tasks with functionality that I believe is required for
5.0 that aren't finished yet. For these tasks we will have an exception to
the feature freeze, but I'd like to merge them into the Qt modules in a
controlled way. So continue working on them, but please talk to me for
reviewing and when to best push them into the master branch.

The exceptions I currently know of are:

* QRegEx and PCRE (QTBUG-23489)
* QFactoryInterface and plugin loading (QTBUG-23540)
* new QMap implementation (QTBUG-23634)
* QtLocation API changes (QTBUG-23891)
* Remove QSettings and old QRegexp from QtCore and into it's own library
(QTBUG-20886)
* QUrl rewrite (QTBUG-23469)

These are in progress/mostly done and still should go in:

* finish codecForCStrings & codecForTr removal (QTBUG-21872)
* Finish the separation of QtQuick1 and QtQuick2 (QTBUG-23737)
* QJS API cleanups (QTBUG-23604)
* Separate QtConcurrent (QTBUG-20982)
* Joao's container work (QTBUG-23589)



These items are still open and we'll need feedback on them:

* QPA interface for native dialogs (QTBUG-20086)
* Styles and QPA (QTBUG-20087)
* network authentication and SLL errors without stalling QNAM
(QTBUG-16251, QTBUG-19032)
* Remove .5 pixel coordinate offset in QPainter for aliased drawing
  (http://codereview.qt-project.org/#change,14936)

Is there anything that I have now forgotten that really *must* be in 5.0
(i.e. it really can't be done in a BC/SC way for Qt 5.1)? If you have such
an item, please speak up, otherwise I'll consider the above exception list
as final.


We also need to now create a team that focuses on creating packages out of
our source code that we can then release. For the Alpha I propose that we
only do source packages (great if we get binaries though), we will however
need to prepare for creating binary packages for our reference platforms
with the beta. I am looking for people who would like to participate in
this process, please speak up if you are interested.


Cheers,
Lars