[Development] Qt 5.2 timelines

[Knoll Lars]

Hi everybody,

just wanted to send out a heads up about the Qt 5.2 timelines.

I'd like to have the feature freeze at the 20th of September, so that we
can have a alpha out before end of September, as discussed. Then we work
towards a beta by the end of October, and a final by end of November.

This is a pretty tight plan, but we can not really do the feature freeze a
lot earlier since we will need the time to finish the Android and iOS
ports and the qml/v4 work. Also KDE was asking for time until the end of
September, so that they will be able to get all the features in that they
need for the first release of KDE Frameworks 5.

An added complication is that 5.2 and Qt Creator 3.0 will have
interdependencies, so we will need to get them ready together. That
implies that we will need to react fast and quickly to any showstoppers
that the creator team finds in Qt 5.2.



We used around a bit more then 3 months to get 5.1 out, and this plan
leaves a lot less time for stabilisation of 5.2. There are however reasons
why I believe we can achieve the plan.

A lot of the delays in 5.1 happened because of 4 reasons:
* stability issues with the CI system
* Adding of two new platforms to CI and packaging
* Lots of late changes to the build system
* Addition of the online installers

None of these should repeat themselves. The CI system is under much better
control now, and we don't add online installers or new platforms again
this time. I'll also veto build system changes after branching into stable.

In addition, the quality of 5.1 is quite a bit better then 5.0, so we
should have less showstoppers during the stabilisation phase..

One thing we need to do however to give us a chance of making the final
release happen according to plan is to add any new modules that will be
part of 5.2 to the packaging now. We had some good discussions around Qt
Connectivity, Mac/Win Extras and Location during the contributor summit,
and should conclude on these modules very soon now.

In addition, I believe we should start creating daily packages from the
dev branch, so that we know our packaging is in a decent shape already
before we branch into stable.

With this in place, I believe we will manage to shorten our stabilisation
phase down to around two months and be able to release 5.2 by end of
November.

Cheers,
Lars