[Development] The final mile

[Knoll Lars]

Hi everybody,

apart from having fantastic Qt Developer Days in Berlin, we finally managed to get the beta2 out last week. Many thanks to all of the people that helped make it happen.

The beta2 is a very good milestone towards Qt 5. We now have packages that include the full content of what we agreed to ship, including Qt Creator. Also our bug numbers are looking ok, with ~50 P0 and P1 bugs left for 5.0.

There are however also a few things left. To be able to now move quickly towards the release candidate and the final release, we need to be from now on very careful in what we stage. 

First of all I'd like to have a pretty hard API freeze from now on. Anything that breaks source or binary compatibility, please add me as a reviewer. If there's not a good reason to get them in now, I'll push all such changes to 5.1.

Packaging has been one of the biggest challenges towards getting all our previous releases (Alpha, B1 and B2) out. The main reasons were that the sources changed underneath the packages, requiring adjustments as we went forward, combined with a very long turn around time for package creation. 

The package creation time is currently being addressed, and hopefully we'll soon be able to get that time down to around 2-3 hours (from 7-8 currently). In addition, I'd like to ask anybody to be careful with changes that might affect packaging, and to add me and Iikka as reviewers for changes where you suspect that packaging might be impacted

With regards to bug fixing, let's focus on P0 and P1 bugs, and close as many of them as possible. But let's simply be realistic. Qt 5.0 will have known bugs. But pushing the release back would not change this, as people will always find new ones. It is now more important to get Qt 5.0 out to create a stable basis for all of us to work upon.

Apart from bug fixing, there are three more items remaining that I'd like to address for the RC:

* WebKit library split (WebKit + WebKitWidgets)

This is a binary incompatible change, that has to go in for 5.0. Most of the QtWebKit team is working on this, and I have good confidence that the change will be and done in some time next week.

* Documentation

While the class level docs are generally speaking pretty ok, we have so far not done enough on the high level documentation structure and overviews.

There was/is a large effort ongoing to restructure and modularise our docs in the newdocs branch(es) in gerrit. Merging that branch has been delayed to after beta 2, but things are starting to look ok there. I believe that we need to have this branch merged in to make sure we have up to date docs for Qt 5, as the old docs still look very much like 4.x. That merge will most likely happen tomorrow or on Wednesday, once we have fixed the infrastructure to generate decent looking web pages out of them.

However, there is still significant work still to write many overview documents. The team in Oslo will in the next days do an extra effort to create these overviews. When reviewing the first set of patches, please do mainly review the content, not the form or language. We'll do a second iteration over the docs once they are in to fixup any potential style/language issues.

We'll post some more info on this tomorrow, and I'd like to invite everybody to have a look at http://community.kde.org/Qt5/Documentation if you want to help.

* Examples and polishing

We currently have way too many examples to be really useful, and many of them are not very polished. We will be doing an extra effort to polish these and define a good set of examples that should be accessible from our docs and Creator.

In addition, we'll need to do regular package testing and check our snapshots from the point of view of our users, to make sure Qt 5.0 has a great out of the box experience.


All of this work will need to happen in the next two weeks, as we're aiming at having everything ready to start testing RC packages by Nov 30th. It's a pretty tight timeline, but if we all work together, I believe we can make it happen.

Cheers,
Lars