[Development] Binary incompatible changes to Qt 4.8

[Girish Ramakrishnan]

On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 2:00 PM, Giuseppe D'Angelo <dangelog at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 23 May 2012 20:03, Girish Ramakrishnan <girish at forwardbias.in> wrote:
>> Hi Andreas,
>>
>> On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 11:12 AM, Andreas Holzammer
>> <andreas.holzammer at kdab.com> wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I wanted to backport the support for Windows 8 to Qt 4.8, which is
>>> already done for Qt5 in https://codereview.qt-project.org/#change,22940
>>> With this change a symbol is added and therefore binary compatibility is
>>> broken. I know i cannot do that for Qt 4.8, so my question if we should
>>> do this anyhow or how we want to handle this.
>>>
>>
>> That change preserves BC (enums don't create symbols either). It only
>> breaks SC between patch releases which we avoid.
>>
>> I think it's fine to backport it and mark the enum with \internal for qdoc.
>
> But that breaks the purpose of the patch: having a public&documented
> way for Qt apps to detect if they're running under Windows 8.
>

I thought the main purpose was to let Qt know about the existence of
Windows 8. Usually, code in Qt usually just does >= VISTA.

But if the goal is for the user to use it, then yes, we have a problem.

> Generally speaking, are there no plans of going towards 4.9 for this
> kind of things? Or slightly change the policies for what regards 4.8?
>

I would actually like to see a 4.9. At the very minimum, a master
branch in qt4 repo would be nice to have. But the logistics both
creating a minor release (and post minor release) will require
somebody to step up and invest a lot of time. Do we have someone who
can invest such time there? Otherwise, it only makes sense to change
our policy a little.

Girish