[Development] Qt 5.2

[Alan Alpert]

On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 5:38 AM, Knoll Lars <Lars.Knoll at digia.com> wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
> With Qt 5.1 is now almost done, this is probably a good time to start
> thinking about Qt 5.2. There's a few things I'd like us to focus on for
> 5.2, but before we get to the content let's have a short look at the time
> schedule.
>
> Our goal should be to release 5.2 in November, so we have a bit of slack
> before christmas. Unfortunately we'll also need some time to still do
> feature development, so the proposal would be to aim for releasing the
> alpha end of September.
>
> Functionality wise, I can see a couple of areas that will be worked on for
> 5.2. I expect a lot of the discussions around 5.2 will happen at the
> contributor summit, but here's anyway a list of things I'm already seeing:
>
> * new Qml engine
>
> See also Simon's mail from a few days ago. We're already pretty close to
> merging this back into the dev branch. CI has been enabled on the v4
> branch yesterday and the final problems are being fixed. Simon or myself
> will send a separate mail about it once we are ready to merge back.
>
> * Full Android and iOS support
>
> Both are expected to be fully working with 5.2.
>
> * Qt Quick Controls
>
> Add support for touch based devices
>
> * Add some of the former mobility modules back into the list of supported
> modules
>
> Alex Blasche has been trying to get an overview over these modules, and is
> working on prioritising things together with the people interested in
> them. The exact scope of what we're aiming for here will most likely be
> finalise during QtCS
>
> * Qt 3D
>
> Are we going to get this one ready in time for 5.2?
>
> * Qt Mac Extras and Qt Win Extras
>
> I hope we'll be able to add these modules to 5.2 as well.
>
> In addition, there's most likely a huge list of smaller features that are
> being planned by different people for 5.2. It would be good if everybody
> speaks up and tells us what they are planning for 5.2, so we can have a
> rough overview over what's coming.
>

At QtCS I hope to corner a QtCore reviewer for the file selectors, and
then I can integrate them into the QML engine. This is intended to
work along with a new QML singleton API added to the language, with
the same features as the existing singleton types you can define in
C++.

There are also some areas of QtQuick configuration such as flickable
behavior and drag/click delays which I plan to make customizable per
platform. Hopefully in a better route than custom defines in the
mkspec.

The qml runtime binary also is nearly done, it only just missed the
boat for 5.1, so that should make it into 5.2.

> Finally, I'd like to discuss deprecation of two modules for 5.2: Qt Quick
> 1 and Qt OpenGL. The reason for deprecating these is that they offer older
> versions of functionality/APIs and we have replacement APIs that are for
> the most part better then what's being offered by these modules. In
> addition, we don't have anybody actively working on these modules and
> maintaining them.
>
> Qt Quick 1 has been superseded by Qt Quick 2 and is currently not being
> maintained by anybody. The best choice is in my opinion to start
> deprecating the module and focus our efforts and time on Qt Quick 2.

It's already in a "done" state and only there to facilitate porting.
We already had the discussion about some people still wanting a raster
item set, but even for those people the correct solution would be to
add a raster item set on top of QtQml. The existence of the QML1
engine in QtQuick1 guarantees that it's purely Qt4Support.

So from my perspective, it was already deprecated.

--
Alan Alpert