[Development] Qt 5.2

[Knoll Lars]

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.


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Qt Quick 1 has been superseded by Qt Quick 2 and is currently not being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.

Most of the functionality of Qt OpenGL is now being offered by Qt Gui and
Qt Widgets. There's a small feature gap that we would still need to fill,
but then we should be able to deprecate the module as well.


Let's see what other things come up for 5.2. It'll be good to start
collecting these things here on the mailing list already now, so that we
can use that as input to the discussions at QtCS.

Cheers,
Lars